A few minutes after my husband and I closed on our new house, nearly two years ago, we did the expected thing. We drove straight home – because this house, which we had never been in alone, was now home – and turned the key in the door for the first time. I was holding our infant son as we crossed the threshold. Even though he was only a few months old, I wanted to tell him what I believe: that you can leave your first home, but it never leaves you.
My first home taught me this. And now that the temperature is rising, I time-travel back to glorious summer days in the yard of that childhood home in Charleston, South Carolina. The overhanging Spanish moss tickles the tops of our heads as my brother and I play outside. When we’re sweaty and sunburned, we race to the end of the dock and cannonball into the creek. It’s just a narrow tributary reaching out from the Ashley River, but to us it’s the entire Atlantic Ocean, mysterious and muddy, and we own a piece of it. Off to the side, Dad prepares a crab trap. Before we’ve had a chance to dream of lunch, blue-clawed critters are gnawing at our chicken-bone bait.
But I’m not a child anymore, and my family left South Carolina twenty years ago. I was a teenager when we moved to the Washington, DC suburbs. Still, my childhood in Charleston – particularly the summer days of my “glad animal movements,” as Wordsworth described his boyhood in Tintern Abbey – set the tone for everything I would come to expect from life.
At least, that’s what I told myself as I moved to new homes again and again over the years. Washington, Amherst, Boston, Charlottesville; and abroad, to Dublin, Jerusalem, and Tokyo. In each new home I looked for pieces of Charleston: a certain swampy smell in the morning, before the fog passed; soft, Southern, light-as-a-feather vowels; or that satisfied feeling that comes from watching kids play kickball in the street at dusk.
I’ve returned to Charleston only once. The trip – which I had envisioned, unembarrassed, as a tour of my youth – was a crushing disappointment. Worst of all was my visit to our wonderful old house. The roof shingles gleamed green, moldy with neglect. The current homeowner glared at me through the window. There was no chance of asking to walk down the dock.
But I have managed to hold tight to my favorite Charleston flashbacks, and they return to me as I watch our now-two-year-old son claim the backyard as his own. As I chase him across the lawn, I see no Spanish moss to tickle the top of his head. No chicken-neck baited crab traps. But I do see, with clearer vision than my memories ever provided, endless summer days stretching out ahead for a child still getting acquainted with his first home.
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