We can't go back in time...

...but we're going back in space. This Saturday afternoon, Husband and I (and Young'un) are going to take a tour of the house I used to live in, the one where I lived when he and I first met. We went for a drive last weekend, took a look at our former homes, and saw a "For Sale" sign in front of mine. We wrote down the realtor's name, and on Tuesday Husband called him.

My parents and I moved into that house when I was eleven, just after starting seventh grade. It was just a couple of blocks away from the junior high school I attended, in a newer neighborhood than the one we were leaving. The house where I was born had practically no yard at all, but this one had been built on a double lot that was also on a corner. The backyard seemed luxuriously huge to me. Out in the north 40, almost to the alley, stood a pole that had held a basketball goal when the previous owners lived there. Come spring, my father would put one up for his basketball-loving daughter, and this would be the premise for the boy who lived across the alley to come over and meet his future wife.

That house was the setting for most of my teenage angst. I was nearly seventeen when we moved out, soon to be a high-school senior, and trying on the role of adult daughter. The walls of that house echoed with angry shouts, sobs, door slams, laughter, hours-long giggling conversations on the phone. The wild mood swings of adolescence, almost bipolar in retrospect: the highs so high, the lows so low. Slumber parties. A petition to keep "The Monkees" on the air. First love. :::sigh:::

I haven't been inside that house since we moved out, in the summer of 1970. I have no idea how subsequent owners have changed it. In my time, there was a one-car garage attached to the house by a breezeway. Many years ago the breezeway and garage were remodeled into part of the house, and a two-car garage was built at the back of the property, entered from the alley. I wonder if the increased square footage of living space makes up for the decrease in backyard. (My past self would say no.) In the first year we lived there my dad built a smooth, curving concrete patio in the corner formed by the breezeway and garage. It didn't surprise me a bit that my father, a factory worker, could build such a perfect and professional-looking patio: I was still in the Daddy-can-do-everything stage then. That stage didn't last; I wonder if the patio did.

Husband told the realtor that we're looking at the house as possible rental property. This is a bit of a stretch, but could become true if the price is right and the property in good enough shape. The neighborhood has declined since the 1970s, but the houses are still well kept, lawns mowed and gardens tended; walls and surfaces free of gang signs. So it's not beyond the realm of possibility that this house that loomed so large in our past could be a part of our lives again. Right now I'm not thinking that far ahead. The very idea of walking into that house again, into those rooms, down the stairs to the basement rec room, out to the tree I used to climb, gives me a hell of a rush. I can hardly wait.