One Last Time

This week's Thursday Thirteen turned into a tribute to my best friend's old house, as you may have read already. This is the house she grew up in. She didn't live here any more, she lives in Georgia now with her husband and two children, but her parents still lived there so it was nice because she would come down all the time to see them and I got to reap the benefits. I grew up in a house about two houses away through some woods and a couple of other yards and I remember going back and forth to our houses one summer when I spent the entire summer barefoot. That was an odd phase of mine, a lot like the summer I went bra-less at work. OK maybe it's not the same thing. You may be thinking, why is this an odd picture of a corner of a house, why not take the picture in front where you can actually see what it looks like? Good question, I might say. It's because, this is a picture of us now, in our 30's, in front of her bedroom window. The very window we used to sneak out of at night when we were about 15. Love that window! Not a lot, just a handful of times. I am sure that my children will not even think about doing this, by the way. It was pretty harmless for us anyway, we weren't what you might call the delinquent type. I only found out a few years ago that there were groups of people who used to drink and party in my high school class and I had no idea! I am not even being sarcastic! Anyway, one time, we took the keys of her brother's car off his dresser, snuck out the window, rolled the car backward down the driveway in neutral (it was a loud car, we of course didn't want to be rude and rouse anyone from their precious sleep!) and drove to the grocery store for what else but chocolate chip cookies. We got caught that time. A friend of ours told his mom he saw us, she told her mom, we got in trouble. For the next few years when I'd spend the night her mom would say to us sarcastically, "Now, you will be staying IN tonight, right?" We may have snuck out once or twice to meet up with some friends, but we didn't drive anywhere, we just walked up to the elementary school up the road and sat on the picnic benches and talked about whatever was important in our little teen lives back then. My parents moved out of the house we grew up in a few years ago. Now her parents are leaving to go up to Georgia so they can be with their grandchildren. It's a sign of the times, really. They're going on to make new memories in a new house. But it's hard to say goodbye to the house you grew up in, isn't it? There's the proms, first dates, driver's licenses, sleepovers, fights, hugs, tears, pets, birthdays, Christmases, all of those things that make a house a home. After my parents left our house, I really never went back and I still don't really want to for some reason. I feel like I'm preserving the house in my memories exactly the way it was and I don't really want to see what the new owner has done to it. We drove by my friend's house a couple of hours after the closing, and no one was there yet, but I am sure that she was pretty happy about not seeing a moving truck in front of it. Someone told her this week that a home is just a roof and some walls. But man, that couldn't be farther from the truth.