When You Go Back Home Again

Although I was born in Kansas City, Kansas, my family moved from there to Oklahoma City when I was in second grade. We then moved to Sumter, SC, Fort Walton Beach, FL, and then, to the suburbs of Washington DC. Ultimately, my dad retired from this job with the FAA and relocated to San Antonio, TX.

All of us kids had been born in Kansas City, as had my parents and all of their siblings. We have wonderful memories of family get togethers. There were always numerous aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins in attendance.

My dad built a house in Kansas City right about the time I was born. He drew up the plans himself. His dad and his brothers helped him build it. My aunts helped with the interior painting and wallpapering. It was a modest 3-bedroom bungalow, but to us it seems like a castle – our family fortress.

After we moved, we’d go back to visit occasionally, but the visits became fewer, the older we became. It turned out that nearly 30 years had passed since I’d been there. My sister Jane called from her home in West Virginia. My Aunt Marty was in a hospice in Kansas City and she wanted to visit her one last time. She asked me to accompany her. So, I drove from my home in West Chester, PA to Baltimore, MD. We flew out of BWI Airport on a Thursday afternoon and stayed through the weekend. It’s a trip I’m very glad I made.

I was surprised that we did recognize some places. Our cousin, Mitzi, took us around the first day to kid of help us get our bearings. She talked non-stop, filling us in on a lot of family history that we didn’t know, and taking us to see the houses our relatives had lived in, churches we had attended, the cemetery were our grandparents were buried. She even brought a Polaroid camera to take photographs for us.

My grandmother’s house was in sad disrepair. The whole neighborhood was pretty run down. We remembered happily skipping down to the corner to Mr. Thomas’s store to buy penny candy. The store was no longer there. We remembered shimmying up to the top of a stop sign pole beside the house. The pole is a lot shorter. (Of course, we are a lot bigger now.) We remembered doing the laundry with Grandma out on the back porch in an old fashioned wringer washing machine. The porch was not there. The present owners are in the process of building a deck.

The house my dad built was for sale. Of course, we wanted to buy it immediately, to preserve that part of our family history, but that would be impractical. Since the house was unoccupied, we peeked in the windows, remembering our bedroom where the bunk beds were placed, the stockings hung on the fireplace at Christmas, sing-a-longs at the piano in the living room, making homemade ice cream out on the screened-in porch and other memories. We drove up the hill to visit with our childhood friend, DeDe’s, mother who still lived there. She was so surprised to see us, but happily recounted tales of backyard barbecues, and neighborhood talent shows we staged in her backyard every summer.

At my Aunt Marty’s apartment we went through boxes of old photographs. We would take some of them over to the nursing home and she would identify people in the pictures and reminisce about the occasion for the picture being taken. I think it was as much fun for her, as it was for us!

It wasn’t easy to leave. There was such a blanket of unconditional love and acceptance, we wanted to go on being “the girls”, and not to have to return to our hectic “real” lives. It was overwhelming to realize that we’ll never see our Aunt Marty again.

How I wish my own children would have this opportunity to “go back home again”. We’ve moved around several times, so I don’t know where they would call home. Perhaps it’s a different place for each of them. Perhaps home, in this day and age, is just where you are for the moment. All I know is, just like Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ, “there’s no place like home” for me!

April 19, 1994