During my sophomore year of college, I went on a ski trip to Vermont.
While I was away, my parents moved.
I knew the move was happening, so it wasn’t a surprise. Still, there was something strange about leaving for vacation from the house where I had lived since I was six years old—and returning to an entirely different home.
My mother had discovered the house one day during her lunch break. It was near the hospital, in a lovely neighborhood, and she immediately saw its possibilities.
The walls were painted yellow, but that didn’t matter to her. The house had built-in bookcases and a fireplace—two things she loved.
My father was drawn to the patio and to the workshop in the basement, where he could tinker with his golf clubs.
Each of them had found something that made the house feel right.
I was happy about the move. The new house was larger, and I would have the entire second floor as my bedroom, complete with my own bathroom.
And because I was away skiing, I managed to miss all of the packing.
When the ski trip ended, I didn’t return to the familiar house I had left.
I went to a new address—a place that already belonged to my family but did not yet feel like mine.
My parents were there, and it was now our home. But I had no memories in it yet.
That was the strangest part. Home had moved while I was away.
Before long, I began helping make the new house feel more like ours.
I helped my mother paint the space behind the built-in bookcases a color called Needlepoint Navy—a beautiful dark blue. I also helped her paint the fireplace mantel, although she chose a different color for it.
That was one of the first ways we put our own mark on the house.
Over time, of course, the house stopped feeling new.
Birthdays, holidays and ordinary family days filled its rooms. Little by little, it became home—not because our belongings had been moved there, but because our lives began happening there.
Several cats made it their home, too—Ellie, Muffy and Charlie, who was my father’s favorite.
Charlie and my father spent many happy hours together on the patio.
Years later, when my parents moved to a retirement community, I considered buying the house myself.
By then, it held many wonderful memories, and part of me wanted to keep it in the family.
But I eventually realized that the house holding my deepest childhood memories was the one I had left behind when I went skiing all those years before.
So I let my parents’ house go.
It had become home, and I loved it—but sometimes a house belongs to a particular chapter of our lives. When that chapter ends, we carry the memories with us.
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