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[resonant]

Lynn, my dental hygienist, just came home from visiting her parents -- the last visit she and her sisters get to make before their parents sell the house.

"I'd go downstairs because I wanted to look down the laundry chute one last time," she said, "and I'd find my sister there, and she'd say kind of shamefacedly, 'I wanted to look down the laundry chute one last time; isn't that silly?' One day we all went upstairs, one by one, because we all wanted one last chance to smell the broom closet."

The house I lived in from ages six to twelve was torn down several years ago; Hurricane Fran spun off several tornadoes that far inland, and a tree fell on the roof. And I don't really miss the house -- I don't even remember it all that well -- but every now and then I'll be assailed suddenly by a sense memory of the bitter smell of the ivy when we cut it so it wouldn't grow over the sidewalk.

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[dsudis.livejournal.com]

Now the next time I'm at my parents' house I'm going to wind up spending ten minutes with my head in the linen closet, because nothing else smells quite like that.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

The kidlet is always talking about what kind of house we ought to move into -- she wants a bigger room and thinks it's unbearable that our garage is detached. I wonder what she'd miss about this house if we moved out?

[dsudis.livejournal.com]

We moved when I was four, in fact, out of a Cape Cod (master bedroom and nursery upstairs, two bedrooms for me and my older brothers down), and when I - inevitably - switched from being excited to wanting nothing to do with it, my parents reminded me how I'd been looking forward to having an upstairs room in the new house. It didn't help, of course, but unpacking enough to make the bed with my familiar old bedspread did.