HOMETOWN

On a rainy afternoon not long ago, I drove by my childhood home not far from downtown Southern Pines. An old friend was with me, someone who also had grown up in town when it was its former drowsy and piney self, when “a sophisticated Mayberry” was an apt description of the place where we were lucky to live, those days now as distant as rotary phones and drugstore orangeades.

We pulled over to the curb, on the north side of the property and then on the east, our conversation seeming to take on the rhythm of the rental car’s intermittent wipers. It was easier to talk about the focus of the visit, a 1950s Cape Cod that held so much family history, than see it, which is why we assumed a couple of different vantage points and why, for me, this has been a rare excursion.

The original structure endures, but it takes some effort to get a glimpse of it, given that it’s surrounded by three “cottages” constructed on the property after we sold, one of them tall and painted a gray so dark it is nearly black. Our former five-bedroom residence is overwhelmed by the looming houses, making it seem like a shed out back of someone’s mansion.

My parents bought our home a handful of years before I was born in 1959. They had been living in Pinedene, close to Mt. Hope Cemetery. When the Highway 1 bypass was being built through their neighborhood, they were forced to move. About 10 years ago, when my mother was in her early 90s, she was in a car with me on a side street not far from the old Lob Steer Inn.

“There’s our old house,” she said. 

I thought her mind was playing tricks, but I subsequently confirmed that the Pinedene house wasn’t torn down but relocated to where Mom said it was. While some other family settled in there, my parents and two sisters moved to their new home. My siblings were off to college and their adult lives less than a decade after moving there, but 390 East New Jersey was my only address growing up.

That fact, as well as maintaining closer ties to our hometown through the years, is why I felt a closer attachment to our house than my sisters did. But we all found pleasure in being able to return there for a long time, perhaps too long if we’re being honest. Increasingly stubborn in old age, when her cognitive decline made things difficult and dangerous, Mom didn’t want to leave for a safer environment.

I won’t forget that day in 2017 when I walked her out the back door for the last time, toward the car and on to an assisted living facility. I would turn that lock dozens more times until the house wasn’t ours anymore. On those visits, I didn’t miss the volume on the television being set to a nonagenarian-without-hearing-aids level. It was nice to put a six-pack on the top shelf of the refrigerator instead of burying it in the vegetable drawer. How, though, I wished she was still there, sitting on her screened-in patio that she enjoyed so much, in a wicker chair that had been on her mother’s porch, azaleas and robins the sights and sounds beyond her favorite oasis.

It had been a home, not a house. As my friend and I chatted in the car so near yet so far from that memory, I was reminded of that.

I suppose I’m glad the structure still stands in its renovated form — that the walls that contained our hopes and fears weren’t demolished — but I will never go inside again. What went on in and around that home lives in my interior, easily recalled, the view unobstructed.