The House that Built Me

For the last 3 years, a piece of me has been missing. My grandma, my best friend.  I started writing this to reflect on myself, and in doing so, I took a walk around her home remembering every single detail about her.  The way her perfume lingered over the bathroom sink. The sound she made stomping her feet running to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The "aw Shit!" she would exclaim every single time she sneezed.  So in doing this, I took a moment back in time to tell you about her and more reflectively, myself.

The first house I will always remember is 198 Leblanc Drive.  This was my Grandma's house.  The ONLY place I will ever actually feel like is home to me.  It's a big, 2 story, white, wooden house.  Very old and very creepy. But it's always felt safe to me.  My grandma shut off the upstairs and left if for storage.  No one was allowed to go up there, so naturally it was haunted.  My cousin once took his rosary and insisted on blessing the house to keep ghosts and evil spirits out. A neighborhood kind exclaimed he saw the blinds move one day while no one was home.  I once found the skin shed by a big snake, which is scarier than any ghost or evil spirit... but that was all.

My grandma had a huge house with probably 7 beds in it, but once my grandpa died, she slept on the couch for years. So when I slept over, I took the love-seat.

Grandma had two bathrooms in that old house.  One was in the very front that had only a shower and one in the very back that only had a tub.  I hated that shower. I was convinced spiders would come up from the drain.  I always tried to take a bath.  Her bath tub was as old as the house and porcelain white.  Her tub was ALWAYS super clean and smelled of fresh laundry and dove soap.  She told me the secret to keeping your tub clean was to take a bubble bath twice a week, and you'd never have to scrub.  She always kept Pantene Pro-V shampoo for me, because she said it made my hair shine.

I was OBSESSED with the closets in that house.  They held so much mystery of a past I wanted so badly to be part of that I just could not stay out of them. All of her clothes and shoes from the 70s and her sunglasses and costume jewelry. I heard story after story after story of fun times of my mom and aunts and cousins that if I could just get in that closet with my grandma's old stuff, then I could be taken back to that time period and be a part of such a happier time that wasn't plagued by the divorce and abuse and poverty I was part of away from my grandma's house.  It was my own personal diversion that took me to another place and time.

She had a huge room with 3 beds in it.  A living room she changed into a hotel for the 30 something grandkids to have when they came to visit.  It had lamps, but no light fixtures, really high ceilings and it was always cold.  She kept osculating fans on all the time. Even if no one was staying. Even if she wasn't home.  Those fans and the fan in her bathroom, the one with the creepy shower, always stayed on.

There was one bedroom on the bottom floor that she called my room.  I don't know why. I don't think I ever once even remotely took a nap in that room.  If I stayed with grandma, I was in the bed with her ( or on the loveseat).  There was a chester drawers and a cedar robe that had old clothes in it just in case I needed something.  Random pictures and things she'd bought me.  She kept a box under the bed of 9/11 clippings.  I don't know why she kept them, but she kept everything she could find in the newspaper for that horrific day of patriotism.  I wonder whatever happened to that box.

The stairs were always the in-between of the out of bounds.  You could get away with playing on the stairs, but don't let grandma catch you in the rooms up there. Or she'd call you by your first AND middle name... which was never any fun, but always funny.

She always had tons and tons of video tapes.  It was her "thing".  There was always a video to watch at her house.  She got all the newest movies and some old ones that you'd never heard of but would watch anyway, like Leo the Lion cartoons from the Super 10.  She bought every single Mary Kate and Ashley video she could get her hands on.  The songs on those videos will forever be instilled in my memory.

I feel like I can name every single picture she had on the walls in the living room.  There was a religious clock that never changed the time.  Pictures of my grandpa and his brothers, cousins, new school year pictures and baby pictures. There was one of my cousin Bonnie who died very young of a birth disorder.  One of my mother and aunts and her all together. Graduation pictures of the older cousins...portraits of PawPaw Adolph's parents.

 One of the most special things about her house was her front door.  It was covered in stickers!  As kids, we would put stickers on the front door. Don't ask why, we just did. And they stayed there.

She had a closet in the utility room where she kept her shoes.  This is where you would find me.  I could sit in her shoe closet for days... It had a string pull light, not a switch.  She had it lengthened til it nearly touched the floor and shoes on a rack as high as the ceiling, or so it seemed to an abnormally short little girl.  I would try on her shoes every single time I went over there just hoping that one day they would fit.  One day, they did; I still continued to try them on every single time I went over to her house hoping she would let me wear them.  Sometimes I would get lucky and then sometimes I would just wear them all over her house, feeling special in her high heels.

Her house was my haven, my sanctuary, my home.  My nannie lives there now, and she's made it her home.  It still smells the same way it did when my grandma lived there. Kinda punches you in the stomach when you walk in the door and don't see her sitting at the table playing solitaire with a deck of cards.  The smile on her face when she saw you walk in the door.  The love you felt in her presence in the house that built me.