Remembering Back Essay, Research Paper
This summer, I visited one of my favorite places from when I was a child. My favorite place was my old house that is on the corner of Ott and Washington Street in Allentown, PA. When I turned sixteen and got my license, I would drive by the house all the time, just to stop for a few minutes and see it, or to show it to my friends when we were in the area. My house was an old colonial that had ivy growing up the chimney. It had a huge backyard that my brothers and I would play in from morning until dusk. I grew up there and have a lot of great memories from my childhood.
Three days before I started college, I decided I would drive by the house and stop, and ask to go in to see how it had changed over the years. The outside of the house looked the same as it did from when we lived there, but all of the trees were better kept, and the big tree in the backyard was not there anymore. It was the perfect climbing tree, even though our mom told us otherwise. It made me sad that somebody tore down my tree. The woman whom my family sold the house to still lived there all by herself. She is a pretty woman in her late thirties with a trim figure, and she seemed very nice. I could not believe she was still single. She introduced herself as Cathy and invited me in, and gave me a tour of the house.
When I first walked in, I could not believe my eyes. It had changed so much. The house seemed enormous to me when I was a child, but now it seemed cluttered, and looked, almost small. All of the furniture was in the wrong places and she put ugly carpet in the foyer, where I used to slide around in my socks on the wooden floor. Just walking into the house brought back a lot of memories that made me sad. I remembered most of them because Cathy changed where they had happened. She either moved around furniture, painted or wall papered the walls, or cut down my favorite tree to transform my old house into what she now calls home.
The entire house looked different from what I remembered of it. The stairway had new carpet, and Cathy stained the wooden banister a different color. The stairwell appeared narrower from what I recall because my brothers and I would slide down the steps, in pairs, in our sleeping bags. Then, she took me into her kitchen, which I could not call my own. Cathy had put in a tacky black and white checkered linoleum floor, and painted over the kitchen cabinets with a hideous off-white paint. The kitchen table was in the wrong place and pots and pans were not hanging above the island in the middle of the kitchen. This made me mad because my kitchen did not look the same at all. One winter when I was younger, my older brother brought in snow from the outside for me to play with on the kitchen floor because I was sick and could not go out a play. The new kitchen table was now covering the spot where I built a miniature snowman on that snowy winter day when I was a child.
Finally, we went down into the basement where my dad had constructed a playroom for us when we were younger. Cathy now had boxes in the playroom, with the rest of the storage, and out of season clothing. The rest of the basement looked mostly the same from when I lived there. I still remember the one summer night when my older brother and I were playing a game down in basement and a bat somehow got into the basement, so we went upstairs and got our dad to catch it. My mom was scared that it could have rabies and did not let us go down and watch, so my brothers and I went around back and crept through the two metal doors in the backyard that go into the basement. The memories I remembered when I visited the house reminded me of my childhood and made me happy, even though I did not live there anymore.
Cathy showed me the rest of the house that refreshed my memories of my childhood. Visiting my old house made me sad and mad, but it also proved to me that it was my favorite place from when I was a kid. It helped me remember things that I do not think I would have remembered otherwise. When Cathy was done giving me a tour of the house, and I was on my way out, she stopped me. She asked if I saw the sidewalk in front of the house. Unaware of what she was talking about, Cathy took me outside of the house and showed me where she was talking about. It turned out that my dad covered up a raised sidewalk with cement and wrote Joey, John, and Thorne in it. I almost had a heart attack because out of all the years that I lived in the house, I never knew about that cement. I had to be about two years old when my dad fixed the sidewalk because my younger brother’s name was not written in the cement, which means he was not born yet. I was so happy that there was still proof that my family lived there besides the memories that we still have and always will.