It’s amazing the resilience of the brain. The ability to recall memories buried and long since believed to be forgotten. Driving up the narrow circular entrance to the childhood home where I grew up dozens of years ago, the difference in size is what first jarred me.

Everything was small. Very, very small. The car I drove today in my adult years versus the tricycle, and then first bicycle all those years ago. The Saturn Relay, hulking over the driveway and barely squeezing through the narrow, gravelly driveway; I thought I would hit the shrubbery my mother and grandmother once carefully planted. It was just a mound of dirt that was molded and shaped by desire and vision.

And my grandfather and dad in the distance pounding and sawing, feverishly building the mammoth colonial structure that I stood in awe of every day they took me to watch it being built.

And today — well, Monday, really, it was a couple days ago — I revisited this structure and it had shrunk. Time had shrunk everything about the house. Kind of like a piece of chocolate in the sun, melting.

I got out of the car and walked up to the door. My heart raced as I looked at the shrunken white pillars. I remember being on the roof of the house and thinking those pillars were like fireman poles, but too big to go down. They didn’t seem that big and fantastic any more. Just white poles today. The day before yesterday. In the past.

The new owners, undoubtedly not the owners who bought the house from my parents but perhaps owners after owners after owner had taken really good care of the home. Letting the shrubbery grow and keeping the front lawn finely manicured. It looked professionally maintained. They had added vinyl siding, but that was about it. There was no vinyl siding, at least that I can remember, just white paint in 1970. They also hadn’t added a doorbell, staying with the colonial style. There were no doorbells in the colonial period.

I knocked three times, softly at first. Rubbernecking from side to side as if there was a surveillance system outside. As I stood in tie and shirt I wondered if the new owners would think I was a salesman there to sell them something: bibles, insurance, some investment … but I wasn’t here for any of that material stuff.

I was here for the memory. Nostalgia.

What would I say?

My mind raced as I waited. Hi, I know this might sound odd but I grew up in this house and I was in the area and wondering if I could take a look around …

Waiting.

I turned and examined the huge hedges that blocked the busy river road. I could still smell the blackberries across the street. The simple, sweet fragrance beckoning across the street. Our dog, Ralph, used to run with us across that street and up the hill, wagging his tail. Ralph was cut down by a guy coming too fast around the River road bend. I will never forget the sight of Ralph’s legs twitching as he lay on the tarmac, the sun beating down on him and tears rolling down my face. I believed Ralph would be ok.

He wasn’t.

And then back to the door in front of me and waiting. Waiting.

The door my grandfather purchased and installed. We lovingly referred to him as Papa in life. A man who constructed houses with the care and concern that you rarely see any more. He flew 25 missions in World World II, was a diehard family man who would kick off work early to go to his kid’s or grandkid’s games. He built the house for $25,000 as he promised the bank he would do. They said the house couldn’t be built for that, but he promised it would stay in budget. Papa had to fight with my mom to make the house stay in budget and he quit a few times in the process. My dad would go out as the peacemaker and get him and usher him back. The house got built. For $25,000, as promised.

Papa passed away a couple years ago at 81. He had a stroke, keeled over and never breathed again. I’m sure he is somewhere above looking down proudly on the house he built that looks as good today as it did some 35+ years ago. Quality construction will outlive us all.

I knocked again, louder this time. I realized nobody was home. It’s odd the feeling that creeps across your chest about how alive or dead an area is, and the area felt wrong. Dwarfed by time, humbled by the clock in the sky, and alone. Melancholy, I just backed away slowly, staring up and around, longingly.

The realization hit me that you can always travel back home and see the structure where you grew up at, assuming it hasn’t been bulldozed or destroyed, but you can never go back to being small and seeing everything larger than it appeared.

I got back in the car and started to drive around the other side of the road. I saw the white picket fence on the side of the house that I helped paint. I remember the smell of that paint and how it seemed like forever paining that huge fence.

It looked much smaller and less significant today, but the new owners of owners of owners thought enough to keep it around. Perhaps because it spoke of yesterday?

I stopped the car, got out and took the picture at the top of this post. It’s not a very good picture, because of the shrubbery that blocks the house, but the quality construction and maintenance still shows. Papa’s work, my dad’s work, my mom’s work, my grandmother’s work.

My mom was never the same after my parents divorced when I was 9. I can still see the tears in my dad’s eyes when he came to tell my sister and I that my mom and he wouldn’t be together any more. I knew we’d still be a family, nothing can take that away, but the truth is after that, our family was changed, broken, disjointed. Nobody will ever convince me that divorce doesn’t alter the landscape of family. My mom would die some twenty-five years later, ravaged by her own personal demons and the bottle and in my opinion the marriage she should have fought to stay in, even if it wasn’t a perfect marriage.

My dad lives in Arizona and rarely comes around these days. We saw him during the summer and he’s doing well. My sister lives in Canada with her family and has moved long since past our first home; she’s doing great too. My grandma lives alone an hour and a half from the house pictured above surrounded by the outdoors, flowers and garden that she adores. She misses her husband, Papa, of course. I think she doesn’t want to leave their last home because it was the last place they lived together and their final home. I understand.

Ahh, the stories from age 9 until present that could be told, but the hour is growing late and a gym beckons to better shape my aging body.

I wonder sometimes if we had stayed in that house what would have happened different in life? Would Papa have lived longer? Would mom have lived longer? I would love to have purchased that house from my parents and I’m sure it would have costed much more than $25,000 by the time, but I’m not sure my wife would care for the house in the same way I did. And do. I’m not sure if she remembers where she first grew up. She had a much different upbringing than I had, and dare I say not even the first nine years were as pleasant, so maybe I’m really lucky to at least have had those glorious days.

The power and reverence that took me as I climbed into my car to exit the house overwhelmed me. It wasn’t the fact that I was leaving home so much as wondering if I would ever see this home again. If I’d ever see what the backyard looked like. I still see it clearly in my mind’s eye: throwing a ball against the wooden backstop with the aroma of mother’s BBQ wafting in the distance. Birds flying over and a long, tall, golden field just beyond leading to the river. Many times we had walked down to the river.

The visions are huge and very detailed in my mind, far larger than the reality that exists just off River Road in Washougal, Washington. It is those wisps of childhood memories that can never be minimized like a browser window. Time can steal everything else from our flesh and bones, but it can never rob our fondest memories.

The last thing I smelled as I left was the cool scent of grass through the open car window. I remember the familiar smell of the front lawn as we rolled in the grass as kids and just laying there face down smelling that. And there was something else the wind brought with that smell. Just a hint. A whisper, a tease perhaps, as if to confirm the one thing that has never faded or been ravaged by time:

You’ll be back.

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