old homes

One summer I broke into my old college room and kipped there overnight. (Mainly because I needed somewhere to sleep and knew how the door worked). It told me clearly that nostalgia of that sort is only good for poisoning ones memories.

Pete surely deserves a round of applause for remembering how a door works? This reminds me of the running gag on last week's Big Train where The Pegg could not open doors.

My parents still live in our old house but my dad is doing his best to wreck it with his plumbing efforts.

I really really get scared doing this. By and large I've never been back. I did pop up to look at the outside of the house in Crookes I lived in for a year in Sheffield recently when I was speaking at a course. The poppies were there in the front garden! It was affecting enough just being in the neighbourhood. God knows what it would be like to actually go inside childhood homes.

Old college room. Strange, no Proustian moments, nothing came flooding back, it just seemed like a standard-issue UBC dorm room. Then again, perhaps that's just because for some reason my memories of the place are a bit shaky, I suspect that's true for most ex- students, especially the ones who enjoyed themselves a little too much.

The door was locked, but there was a special way you could jiggle it. Followed by the really hard kick.

I see. I once had someone knock on my door at college as my room was once their room and they wanted to show someone. It was a really great room though, long and narrow with slopey ceiling and beams (which I constantly banged my head on when putting on shoes, doh) and views of the Nun's Garden. Nonetheless I cannot see myself returning there in years to come and demanding that the current inhabitant lets me poke around.

you probably won't want to do it until you have a midlife crisis or something. I don't have a room at college cos I live with Mummy and Daddy, if I screw up really badly maybe I'll get the house someday.

I have driven past my childhood home and felt sad and bitter. I haven't been in it though. I have been to my old college house and was horrified to discover the residents had painted the kitchen cabinets wacky colors.

I would rather not go back-- *is slugged from behind by shadowy figures*

Moving on -- I've been in Coronado once since the family moved out in 1994, but I didn't swing by the house itself. My memories are generally nice, but the person I was is long gone, and in many ways that's a good thing. I will let the house stay in the memory banks without reality impinging on it.

ive been thinking about this again

"You can't go home again" .. one of my favorite cliches, because it's so true.

.....

I was watching some movie or TV show, and this guy goes back to his old house to look for something. A kid found him poking around in the back yard and his mother came out to see who the kid was talking to. She was about to kick his ass, and the guy said, "It's OK - I used to live here." And she calmed down and let him in to have cookies. It's one of those scenes that I can't forget, because I thought she should have said, "No, it's not OK, you motherfucker. I don't give a shit where you used to live, get the FUCK off my property!"

I did this once, I went to see the house I'd lived in ages 13-16, only to find that the house had been sold and someone was in the process of moving in that day. It made me incredibly sad.

Now my mother lives almost across the street from one of my former apartments. When I visit her I also drive by several other places I've lived during/after college. Makes me nostalgic but what about houses doesn't. I spend way too much time already thinking about places I've lived.

I see my old houses at least once a month. I only pass them by. Most have been changed: one's turned into an appartment and the other, which is just a few houses from where I live, has been incorporated into the adjacent house. (?) I don't ever go into'em though. I think teh shock would be too great: one was just a complete dump (*mushrooms* growing on the walls, raining inside, a chimney nearly falling on my mum's head YAY) and the other is unrecognizable anyway.

My mother lives, in a house she co-designed and had built the year I moved out, across the street from the house I grew up in. It's an odd thing: the house is an old Colonial, a former farm and boarding house, and although my mother renovated one thing every year we lived there, they were always fairly practical things. She re-roofed the garage, refloored the kitchen, removed the lead paint still left in one of the rooms, that sort of thing. Well, and we put a tennis court in where the goldfish pond had been, yeah.

The new folks bought the house on a buyers' market when my parents had to sell it at a loss because of the divorce agreement. The barn -- which had been one of those old New England barns that's just one big room and a loft, with a granite floor and old wooden beams and owls and paper wasps -- was first turned into a guesthouse, and then connected to the main house by means of a new wing, making the whole thing this huge L-shaped building. My old bedroom -- one of the rooms you can see into vaguely as you drive by, if the shutters are open -- has changed color. Part of the lot has been subdivided, and there's a new house where our field used to be. The front porch -- which my mother never got around to repairing -- has been redone, and most of the shrubbery hiding it removed, so that that door's actually used now, even though the driveway's on the other side of the house.

It's very weird, and that's just the stuff I can see driving by every few years. It's exactly the kind of house I'd never want to live in again, in almost every respect except its size and the lot itself, but I like having lived in it.