I haven’t seen my childhood home in longer than I ever lived in it.
That’s a strange thing to realize.
It wasn’t the house I was brought home from the hospital to. It wasn’t the house my mother and father moved into when they got married.
But from about three until fourteen, it was home.
Willow Creek Drive.
The first address I ever learned.
And even now, I could probably walk through that house with my eyes closed.
You’d walk through the front door into the entryway. To the left was my mom and stepdad’s room—the “parents’ room,” obviously. To the right was the garage. Straight ahead were three little steps that took you into the main part of the house.
Living room on the left.
Dining room and kitchen on the right.
My mom went through several decorating experiments in that living room over the years, but my favorite was the Italian-inspired sponge-paint era.
Listen.
It was the early 2000s.
We were all making choices.
The kitchen was bright yellow, and we ate dinner together at that table every night.
We didn’t have a ton of family traditions or rigid structure, but dinner was dinner. We all ate at the same time, and we prayed before we ate.
At some point, my stepbrother introduced another sacred family tradition: secretly putting on a masquerade mask during dinner and waiting to see how long it took somebody to notice.
I don’t know why.
There were five of us.
You learn not to ask too many questions.
The living room had a fireplace surrounded by these massive, practically floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with hundreds of knickknacks, VHS tapes and, eventually, DVDs.
I remember when the VHS tapes started getting moved into storage to make room for the DVDs.
That’s how old I am now.
I have witnessed a media format become obsolete.
Those shelves were also an absolute nightmare on cleaning day.
Saturday mornings had their own soundtrack at Willow Creek. If my stepdad had the classic rock playing obnoxiously loud, sweetheart, put on your cleaning clothes.
We were cleaning.
And apparently that one stuck, because all these years later, I still clean my own house every weekend with the music turned up entirely too loud.
Music was everywhere in that house.
If you went up the big staircase, you entered what was essentially the kids’ territory.
The Wild West.
At the top was a long hallway stretching in both directions. There were bedrooms everywhere, a bathroom with a separate little room that contained nothing but a sink—which was actually genius when you had that many kids trying to get ready—and a giant linen closet that made one of the best hiding spots in the house.
The actual upstairs hallway at Willow Creek. It felt huge as a kid—and somehow, all these years later, I can still hear five kids running through it.
Then there was the red room.
It was an attic space that had been converted into a room, and it was filled with guitars, basses, a drum set, microphones and recording equipment.
My stepdad was a musician by hobby, but he was incredibly talented, and he believed kids should know music.
Not just one kind of music.
Music.
So somehow I grew into an adult who can happily bounce from Hank Sr. to Zara Larsson to Miley Cyrus to the Eagles to Def Leppard without feeling the need to explain myself.
I cannot be convinced my taste in music is wrong.
I was raised for this.
And that house was never quiet.
Five kids, stair-stepped in age, plus a man who loved music?
Quiet wasn’t really an option.
Honestly, when the house was quiet, it was eerie.
There weren’t many doors being slammed, either, because sweetheart, doors were a privilege—and sister, let me tell you, it was not one we got often.
You know that scene in Freaky Friday where she comes home and her bedroom door is gone?
Yeah.
My stepdad invented that move before the movie even thought about airing.
The upstairs belonged to us kids.
We weren’t a living-room-toy family. Toys and playing happened outside or upstairs.
And when the parents weren’t home?
Godspeed to the lamps.
We had a rotation of games, but two favorites were Hide-and-Seek and Blind Man’s Bluff.
I’m still not entirely sure whether Blind Man’s Bluff was an established game or something the five of us collectively hallucinated, but our version was essentially Marco Polo on land.
Blindfold one child.
Spin them around.
Tell them good luck.
Their job was to wander around blindly until they managed to tag somebody.
Indoors.
Mom lost some good lamps and probably a few heirlooms to Blind Man’s Bluff.
But we gained some excellent memories.
I’m not sure that trade felt fair to her at the time.
We spent most of our time at that house, and when I think about childhood, that’s where my mind goes.
I can see the little cast-iron-looking mailbox attached near the front door. Everybody’s mailbox was by their door in that neighborhood.
Our mailman walked the whole neighborhood delivering mail house to house, and that man wore shorts through practically anything.
You didn’t need to check the weather.
If the mailman had pants on?
Baby, it was cold outside.
I remember Christmas there.
We didn’t have a lot, and there were a lot of us kids, but somehow my mom and stepdad made Christmas feel magical.
I couldn’t tell you most of what I got.
But I remember what it felt like.
I remember five kids watching TV together.
Sitting around the dinner table trying with everything in us not to laugh because one sibling was getting chewed out and knowing full well that laughing would get the rest of us dragged into it.
I remember Hamburger Helper.
So. Much. Hamburger Helper.
I still can’t eat it.
We loved it then.
We’ve apparently reached our collective lifetime limit.
I remember bagged cereal—if you know, you know—and my mom constantly baking something good.
I remember the noise.
The music.
The hallway.
The yellow kitchen.
And I remember other things, too.
Willow Creek wasn’t only the happy parts.
It was where I experienced some of my first heartbreaks and betrayals. Where I tested boundaries. Where I was afraid. Where I was safe.
It’s where I learned about Jesus and where I questioned whether He existed.
It’s where my family was divided and somehow also made whole.
That house was a contradiction.
And I guess, depending on which glasses I’m wearing when I look backward, so was my childhood.
There was joy there.
There was fear there.
There was warmth and laughter and sadness and pain.
All of it can be true.
A year or so ago, I found Willow Creek on Zillow.
I don’t know what I expected.
But it wrecked me.
Someone had bought it and renovated it.
The bones were still there. The layout was almost exactly the same.
But it was new.
Clean.
Updated.
Beautiful.
And white.
Those white walls felt like they had washed away my childhood.
Where was the yellow kitchen?
Where were my mom’s sponge-painted walls?
Where was all the evidence that seven loud, complicated people had once lived an entire life inside that house?
For a moment, I hated it.
And then I thought about another family moving in.
Maybe another bunch of kids.
Maybe siblings like us, where you’d need a flowchart to explain who was technically half, step or whole to whom.
We had different moms, different dads and different last names.
But we didn’t walk around calling each other our half-sister or stepbrother.
There were just five of us.
We were siblings.
And I like thinking that maybe another set of kids gets that upstairs now.
Maybe they’ll find the best hiding spot.
Maybe they’ll sit around that same dinner table trying desperately not to laugh while somebody else is getting in trouble.
Maybe they’ll fill that giant hallway with a completely different kind of noise.
Maybe they’ll make the house theirs.
Because those white walls didn’t actually erase anything.
I can close my eyes and still see it.
The music room is still red.
The hallway is still huge.
The house is still loud.
And underneath all that beautiful white paint,
my kitchen is still yellow.
— Jane
Grace for the mess. Grit for the rest.
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