Yes, You Can Go Home Again

Sniff, sniff… what’s that I smell? Is it the faint, lingering scent of a stale blog? You know the smell—it’s like towels you’ve left in the washer for too long.

That’s kind of what this space feels like today - forgotten, a little musty, and in need of some fresh air. But hey, stale or not, here we are, and I’m cracking the windows to let some life back into this blog, so on to today’s story…

Last week, after nearly fifty years, I went back to the neighborhood where I grew up. I lived in three different houses on the same street until I was twelve, and for the last few decades, I wasn’t ready to revisit them.

There’s a question that has always lingered in my mind: Can you go home again? Can you walk those familiar streets and see the houses where you spent your earliest years? The answer is yes, and in doing so, I discovered that home isn’t just a place—it’s a mix of memories, feelings, and a quiet magic you have to be ready to face.

And now, I want to share a glimpse of that journey with you. Here are the three houses I called home as a kid, each holding its own stories, memories, and echoes of the past.

This is the first Lowell Street house I lived in that my parents rented between 1967 and 1970.

It was a tiny house, and ancient even in the early 1970s. Because I was so young, I don’t have many memories there other than biting my newborn sister when she came home from the hospital and throwing up when my mother forced me to eat mashed potatoes at dinner.

Beside that house, our neighbors, the Cristellos, an older, childless couple, built a garage when I was about five. The garage sat on the upper part of their yard, perched slightly above the rest of the property, and is still there today.

For as long as I lived in that alley, that garage gave me the creeps. Being near it always felt like someone or something was watching me. I was so spooked that I’d ride my bike in a wide arc around it, and I never went inside, even when the door was open and our kickball rolled in.

Recently, I was at the cemetery walking among the headstones of relatives and noticed one nearby that read Cristello. I shockingly learned that Mr. and Mrs. Cristello had two sons who died very young from complications of diabetes in the 1940s. Could it be that their spirits were still lingering in the early 1970s, staying close to their parents in what was once their backyard? I’ll never know, of course, but it feels like an eerie coincidence.

My parents built this house for $3,500 in 1970, so I was told, right across from the one next to the haunted garage. Today it looks almost exactly as I remember, though back then the siding was burgundy and a stretch of concrete was a colorful flower bed.

It was an odd house, built backwards, with the back facing the alley and the front opening onto the backyard. Which meant, in a way, it didn’t have a true front door.

I remember jumping up and down like an annoying little maniac the day they moved in, roller skating and playing with Barbies on the driveway, and the yellow shag carpeting in the living room.

Behind that house and sharing the same backyard was this house where my grandparents lived. Of all three houses I lived in on Lowell Street, this one felt the most like my real home.

My grandmother had a beauty shop in the front of the house; the basement was a giant playroom. There was a sewing room upstairs where she taught me how to make Barbie clothes. A drawer in the kitchen was always filled with those sickeningly sweet pink wafer cookies.

Today, it has a jungle-like Jumanji vibe, but in the 1970s, the yard was all grass without that other crap in the picture. The house was painted white and framed by neat flower beds, with a patio that held a swing and a little swimming pool where my friends and I spent endless summer afternoons.

I was embarrassed that we lived in an alley, while my friends’ houses lined the main streets in front of or behind ours. And yet, despite that, Lowell Street was my world—a place where I felt safe, grounded, and filled with happy times I wouldn’t trade for anything. And fun fact, both my parents grew up on opposite ends of the street and met on that street. Same with my grandparents. My great-grandparents lived there, too, along with several of my aunts and uncles.

We moved from Lowell Street to the country when I was twelve, because my grandmother died, causing a mountain of complications. It was… well, hard—though I didn’t fully realize just how hard until recently. In one summer, my life completely changed, and everything that felt familiar and safe was gone. Looking back, it felt like the Wizard of Oz in reverse: leaving Technicolor behind and stepping into black and white.

Our family dynamic changed, my sense of displacement was strong, and I was lonely in the country. I missed my friends and how we would laugh so hard I almost peed right down my shoe. I missed catching lightning bugs, sledding down the hill on the corner, playing kickball in the alley, or hide-and-seek in our yards, the simple joy of walking to the corner market to buy penny candy, and just being in that place where I felt so secure, innocent, and carefree.

I moved away right after high school, and I avoided Lowell Street, even editing a lot of it out of my own story. My brain needed to tuck away the chapters that felt unresolved, waiting until I was ready to face them.

But last week, the right amount of time seemed to have passed, and I walked those streets again. I finally felt ready, and surprisingly, it was freeing—joyful, even like something I didn’t know I needed until I did it.

Here’s the thing I learned about going home after almost 50 years: It’s bittersweet. Happy memories come flooding back in bright, vivid detail, but so does the quiet evidence of time’s passage. Houses lean a little more, paint fades, and the familiar neighbors who once filled the sidewalks are only ghosts in your mind. It’s disorienting, almost like stepping into the Twilight Zone—finding yourself in a place where time has both stood still and marched relentlessly forward, all at once.

Yes, you can go home. And when you do, you Click! File! Save! Stay in the moment and remember what a wistful joy it is to look forward to all that is next, while everything that has happened slowly fades away.