Poor kids, though. To lose your mother in such a fashion? The house fell on her.
They must feel like the universe is against them. Very sad.
Yeah, my sadness obviously pales in comparison to theirs, to say the least. And I know I'm hardly the first person ever to lose their current or former home in an instant. And that it hadn't been "home" for almost half my life now. But it still hurts a little to realize that it's completely gone and never will be again.
The house that collapsed was the third of three that we lived in while I was growing up. The first was an idyllic three-bedroom suburban house, big yard, nice school a few miles down the road. We knew our neighbors and a ton of others in the neighborhood. I got along well with my elementary school classmates and, as near as I could tell, was kind of popular.
It was paradise.
We lost that house when I was 10 and moved into another one a couple of blocks from and very similar to No. 3. A three-story row home duplex. It was utter misery. Decent neighborhood, but our family started splintering. One of my sisters became a black sheep and had a kid when she was in high school, Dad drank, Mom tuned out, and I went through a juvenile delinquent phase where I ran with the bad kids (to be fair, they were the only ones there that were my age) and our crew was pretty much responsible for most of the neighborhood's problems. Once my two sisters moved out, I moved into the attic because it had hookups for cable and a phone. It also had no heat.
I broke off from that group of friends my freshman year of high school and we moved to the collapsed house about a year later. December 1992, I think. It was only four blocks away, but it felt like a different planet. Our family still had the same issues but the house was nicer. Other than around school, I never saw the bad influence friends again. It was pretty much on an island, with a business on one side, a main road out front and an empty corner lot on the other side. We really had no neighbors even though we were smack dab in the middle of the city. After the misery of the previous few years it felt good to get away.
My room was the same way. It was on the third floor -- it took up the entire third floor -- and was roughly the size of a small studio apartment. You had to go up a steep staircase to get up there so my parents rarely if ever came up. There were small crawl-in closets in three corners, a crawlspace in the fourth, and three cubbyhole lofts for storage or screwing around in about 6 feet above the floor. One loft was over the stairs and I never went near it, since it was about a 15-foot drop down the steep staircase if you slipped climbing up. That part that fell onto the sidewalk, the window with the AC unit, was a small cutout that was akin to a bay window but square. I had a desk and a bookshelf over there. It was 5 or 6 feet deep. I'll never forget during the 1993 Superstorm seeing a small bird land on the outside ledge in front of it, just to take a break from flying in the driving snow. It hung out for a couple of minutes and then flew off again.
I was in that room when I got the call to come interview at a paper 1,200 miles away in June 1998. I was in that room the first time I made out with a girl. I spent God only knows how many hours up there with my best friend, forging a lifelong friendship over Mortal Kombat 3 on the SNES and other video games.
Even though we lived in three houses all for about the same amount of time, and my parents moved out not long after I did, this one really was where I grew up. It wasn't even our house. It was a rental. But I think this one will always be home.
