Twas Brillig

It’s Flashback Friday, friends!

“So, what do you think of Mom and Dad selling the house and buying a condo?” my brother J asked me when he met me at the airport.  My parents were standing right there, shifting nervously.  Clearly they hadn’t intended for him to bring it up, especially because I knew NOTHING about it.

I’d been studying in Italy all summer while J had been working in Kentucky and my parents had been on some luxury cruise in Tahiti (and yes!  Those destinations describe our three distinct personalities perfectly).  I’d been very lonely in Italy and I was at an age (I’d just turned 15) where my friends and my social life trumped just about everything else.

And this bomb that J had just dropped meant that the friends that I was so excited to come home to were soon going to be miles away.

And plus, it was my house!  My house!!!  It was a great big house with 8 bedrooms, two huge family rooms, a formal living room and a music room.  The backyard was gigantic and had a swimming pool and a full-sized tennis court, along with lots of trees and grass to play in.

And now we were moving to a condo.

To say that I was furious would be an understatement.

J hadn’t been bothered by the news when he’d heard it.  He was off to college in a different state anyway, and then he’d serve a mission.  All of my other siblings were gone by now.  I would be the only one left at home.  It would only affect me.

Which is, perhaps, why I was so angry.  I still had 3 years left at home, and yet my parents were talking about this as their way of retiring and downsizing, as though I wasn’t a part of this picture.  It didn’t seem at all fair that my parents would make this leap without even consulting me.  If I were a baby, I would of course have to go along for the ride.  But at 15, I felt old enough to have my opinion taken into account.  And they’d clearly been sneaky about it.  They’d purposefully NOT told me.

When we got home that night from the airport, Emily (who lived next door) and Matt (who lived across the street) were waiting for me.  We were my bestest of friends–my whole world!–and I’d missed them so desperately.  I told them that the house had sold.  They knew this, of course.  They’d watched it all happen.  We all expressed our sorrow over it.  But as we all talked that night, trying to fall right back into where we’d always been, it was clear that we’d all changed a lot over the summer.  I suppose I had especially changed.   I’d been in Italy all summer, working and studying and indulging in a new culture, a new world.  They had been at home, doing what they did every summer at the same old places with the same old people.  We were all civil and polite, but I found that they couldn’t relate to me and I couldn’t relate to them.  We’d already moved away from each other emotionally.  The physical move wouldn’t be nearly so painful in comparison.
(Matt came back into my life in a huge way a few years later, as many of you who have been reading my blog for a while already know.  But that’s another story for another time.)

When everyone left that night, I knelt by the side of my bed and sobbed.  This was not the homecoming I’d anticipated.  Everything was wrong.

The next day, my parents took me to see the new condo.  I thought it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen.  They explained that they were going to remodel this, add a room here and there, change the carpet and the walls, etc.  I tried to grasp their vision, but really I just thought it was ugly.

And the neighborhood?  It was Snob Hill.  Oh, I couldn’t bear it.  I’d spent the last many years mocking Snob Hill and couldn’t imagine living there, among the cheerleaders and jocks who drove BMW’s while snorting their cocaine.  These were the people that made everyone’s life a living hell in high school, and now they were going to be my neighbors.

Flash forward 14 years and here I am, in this very house, babysitting it while my parents are gone.  I’m sitting in my father’s office–now my office– and realizing how very pretty it is.  My parents had real vision as they were recreating it.  They added walls and removed walls and all in all made it a very lovely and functional place.  I love that there’s no yard work, but that there’s a playground right off to the side of us and a community swimming pool and tennis courts just around the corner.  You can hardly call it a “condo”–it’s so much more spacious than I ever think of when people say “condo.”  It only shares one wall and yes, I do hear the neighbors from time to time, but only in one part of the home.  And, frankly, they’re kind of entertaining!

I still keep in touch with most of the friends I met through living here (hi Jewels, Kate, and Hannah!) and it turned out that while yes, most of the people were awful, there were a few amazing people that my soul was just waiting to discover, and my life was never the same once I did.

Living here now is a bit surreal.  It’s like Flashback Friday every day.  I’m surrounded by memories and photos and pieces of my childhood family.  And I’m enjoying it so much.  I’ve been scanning in piles of my dad’s slides and photos and telling my kids the story behind various paintings and other collectibles.  While I don’t want to minimize how painful it was for me to move here back then, I have to acknowledge that my parents moving here all those years ago was the right choice, and all these years later I’m the one who’s reaping the benefits of that choice.