sentimental warm weather

This house was old and forever dirty but it was the first house I thought of as a home that didn't belong to my parents and it was my home because I did so much growing between its sage green walls and rambling three floors.

It had a large, forest green wrap around porch that I now wish I had spent more time on. Inside, it had a real working fireplace and two living rooms and flowers stained into the windows and arched doorways and the tallest windows and so much light. The kitchen was tiled green and white and there was a tiny sun room off the kitchen that stored the remnants of last night's parties and one time my roommate opened the door to find a homeless man riffling through these remnants on a Sunday morning. There were two full washrooms and six bedrooms and curved staircases and secret hideaways for the cats under these staircases. There were more windows upstairs, too. And there was a little nook in the wall that never got filled quite right. The backyard was long and wide and full of the biggest tree and the most unsafe firepit. My roommates once caught a couple out there under that tree and amongst the bushes. My bedroom had four closets and two windows that led onto a roof I used to welcome spring and summer. And there was the biggest tree outside those two windows, too, and the sun would shine through the branches of those trees to wake me every morning.

The house creaked and groaned and every shutting of a door was like a whisper. It was always full of people and spills and too much garbage. But it was also what I woke to on the first day of school and what I came home to after my last exam for two years. And it held my hand as I sat late into the night typing essay after essay or to boys two hours across the 401. It was a room in a house that we painted together and then broke up in twenty months later. It was the last place I ever spoke to him. It was a room and a house that saw me welcome new boys into my life back when I thought there could never be anyone else. It saw new sleepovers and heard new phonecalls and it was the house I went back to after first seeing him on the street in the rain and knowing I would never ever forget his face and knowing that I would oneday hold that face.

Today I can still look at this picture and hear the sounds of traffic passing by and remember how it felt to round the corner and be greeted by the grandness that was this house and those two years. When I think of this house, it is always the beginning of spring and the sun always stays out later than it ever actually does and there is a lightness in the air and there is anticipation and hope and because of all this, this house will forever be home even if it's just now a mere home in my memories.