Reflecting on my childhood home
Some summer days in Virginia the air is so saturated with water that you could practically swim in it; where the noon sun blasts through all of those vapors filling the air with a steaming haze.
Those are the Virginia summer days I miss so badly in the winter.
When the sun starts to melt into the treeline at the end of the street the whisper of crickets, cicadas, and owls fills the air. That southern humidity doesn’t go nowhere, not till October if you’re lucky.
Our house was one of the more modest on Lemon Thyme Drive. Autumn Chase was one of those late 90s suburbs of the mid-Atlantic, where all the houses were built with a colonial facade. Most are covered with purposeless plastic shutters flanking the windows, hollow columns that bear no weight, a disgusting amount of gables, and an enormous bank window above the door. Sitting in the back of our Nissan as we entered the neighborhood coming back from wherever, I once asked “How come they only put bricks on the front of all the houses?” “It’s cheaper” my older brother answered. They were a caricature of the real ones.
All of the streets in the neighborhood were named after herbs. There was parsley, cinnamon, apple mint, cilantro, and our lemon thyme. The only one not named after an herb was Schurtz St. which connected all of the rows of herbal streets. Schurtz was the name of the family who owned the horse farm that our development was built over and I imagine before that it was Native land.
When I was a child I always drew houses with a tall wide bank window and wide columns because I thought it meant you were richer. Later I found out that this is why they call it a bank window in the first place. We didn’t have a bank window or columns.
Our house on the other hand only had the plastic shutters, no stupid gables, just a small sunset shaped window above the door that you could barely fit a person through. The facade was flat, covered in sienna bricks like the real colonial era homes downtown.
The lawn was protected from the ruthless Virginia sun by our peculiarly shaped cherry blossom; “the only real one on the street” my father would say; the same you’d find lining the banks of the Potomac river in DC.
Every April it bloomed into a million brilliant baby pink blossoms and snowed down petals until the tar driveway was coated in its sweetness. But by the summertime the bright green leaves had already replaced those blossoms.
When I was young my mother kept the garden blooming with flowers of all colors. Irises, roses, daffodils, and wild ones I never knew the names of. By the time I was 14 all that was left were the climbing red roses that caressed you as you entered the front door, leaving a trail of floral essence behind you.
This is the house I still live in when I dream at night. That place holds such a sacred place in my heart that could never be replaced. I write this as I am only weeks away from finishing college wondering where the time went. Wherever I go in life I will always take Virginia with me.