my childhood's home

As I pulled the mass of folded quilt out of my suitcase, I got a whiff of my grandmother's house, a scent trailing back into days long gone. I know this quilt. It used to sit at the end of the guest room's white bed. But I never thought it to be a guest room -- it was our room, the kids' whenever we came to visit. We weren't guests, we were temporary residents. There's a difference.

Whenever we travelled to visit our grandparents, on either side, we simply moved from Home to Home. I knew their houses as well as my own. I grew up in these houses. Their painted walls, worn out carpeting, quietly tiled bathrooms have recorded my entire history. My childhood is a series of framed photographs strung across their open faces.

In that house, we used to slide down those rough steps in laundry baskets, toppling at the end, our laughter wild with excitement. The small air vents in the upstairs rooms provided perfect telephones, even though we had to speak so loud that we could hear each other through the halls anyway. Our little hands and noses would smudge the glass of the sliding doors as we pressed up against them to watch the train go by. We carefully propped ourselves up on the tall kitchen stools, wiping the sleep from our eyes as we waited for breakfast.Whenever we played hide-and-seek, that house was at our mercy, and yet we always seemed to end up in our grandparent's closet, barrelling through the clothes, curling up silently in dark corners. 

In this house, the wide marble staircases offered me a game of lily pad -- going up or down, I could only step in the white spaces, avoiding black veins as nimbly as possible. The black and white tiled kitchen laid out for me the same prospects. It was during such a game that I discovered one black tile to be mispatterned. When I was seven, I lit my first firecracker in the backyard. I used to walk around outside, talking to the plants, balancing on the edged gardens (where has that grace gone?). I knocked my tooth out on the wooden framing of the upstairs living room couch. The small mark of two shallow half-moons still stands out in the dark grains. We each slept in that crib. There is always a stack of blank paper and colorful markers for us at the ready on top of that shelf. How many family birthdays have we celebrated at the square center table, only to be celebrated again on a much grander scale in the huge dining room? How many times did I rush upstairs after school, poking my head through the decorative metal bars, to check if my grandfather was sitting in his chair, before running to give him a hug?

Neither of these houses stand exactly the way they used to. Parts of my histories have been covered up with fresh coats of paint, new fabrics, rearranged photos. In their efforts to update themselves, big or small, these houses have lost track of me. And every time I go back to stay, something in the changes alarms me. Like the threads of time are being cut loose while I still struggle to hold on. It terrifies me.

It terrifies me not because I'm slipping or because my grip is getting cramped, not because my homes are becoming gradually unrecognizable. It terrifies me because I haven't found myself a new home, for right now and today, and my quietly ending childhood's homes are the only ones I've got.