Going Back to Your Childhood Home: What I Found After 50 Years

I’ve been playing a game with myself for as long as I can remember. I try to picture a place, down to the smallest detail, every wall, every room. If I can’t remember something, was there a closet there? I turn it over and over in my mind until it comes back to me. The place that shows up most is always my grandmother’s house. Since my parents passed away, I’ve noticed I do this more. I’m the next generation now, maybe the last one, who remembers all of us together, in that house. Going back to your childhood home as I’ve gotten older has so much more meaning.

I hadn’t set foot in that house since 1976. I was sixteen. Do the math on that and you’ll understand something important, this wasn’t a place I visited a handful of times as a small child. It was woven through my entire childhood and most of my teenage years. Birthdays, Christmases, ordinary weekends, all of it happened inside those walls.

Going Back to Your Childhood Home

The Idea

My youngest sister had always wanted to go back. So one day she just decided to act on it. She found out the house was owned by a group of investors who rent it out to college students, and she reached out to the realtor to see if there was any chance we could get inside.

There was, or so it seemed at first. The realtor even floated the idea that we might spend a couple of nights there, sleeping bags on the floor. So the four of us, siblings who hadn’t all been in one place together in years, made a plan and flew in from different parts of the country.

The First No, and the Second

We landed, got a rental car, and let the realtor know we were in town. That’s when the first no came. No overnight stay, she told us. Maybe in a week or so, she could work something out for a quick look around.

We told her we’d all just flown in, together, for the first time in years, specifically for this, we were only staying a couple of days. We stayed firm without pushing too hard, careful not to turn a maybe into a final no. So we waited.

Arriving

We drove to the house that evening anyway, just to see it from the outside while there was still daylight. And there it was, exactly the way I remembered it. We pulled into the driveway and sat there for a second, then we started getting out of the car and walking up to the house. As I stood there within 10 feet of the door, I said “Let me just absorb this for a second.” I needed to take that mental snapshot and remember this exact moment.

We couldn’t get in yet, so we did the next best thing. We peeked in the windows. We walked around the yard and remembered where I lost my earring after getting my ears newly pierced; we remembered the slope in the side yard where we rolled down the hill in summer and sledded in winter; we remembered cutting asparagus in the garden where now a new house is standing.

Later that same evening, we went back to sit on the porch and watch the fireflies come out. I snapped a photo of my youngest sister sitting in that exact spot, the same stretch of porch where I’d once sat as a toddler myself. That night, my sister found her own way INTO the house, but that’s a story for another video.

Looking at it all together now, my mother sitting there young, me as a baby on that porch, and both my sisters there again as adults, it really did feel like three generations sharing one setting. My grandma, my mom and my sisters.

We approached the front door. The door still had the same hardware from when my grandparents built the house in the 1950s, a spade-shaped handle, a spade-shaped lock. And there, in the door, a mail slot.

My youngest sister got there first. She leaned down and took a breath in. And just like that, fifty years disappeared. She was flooded with something none of us expected, just from a smell. So we each took our turn, kneeling at that mail slot.

My grandmother heated the house with black coal, never wood. Coal has its own smell, nothing like anything else. And when it hit me, I was standing in that kitchen again, the whole house rushing back in one breath.

The Deer

We called the realtor again the next day, careful not to overstay our welcome but clear about how much we wanted in. She arranged for a handyman to meet us and let us in for an hour or so.

We arrived a little early. Driving down the street toward her corner lot, on a road that’s usually busy, we saw two deer standing in the middle of it. As we got closer, they moved, slow and unhurried, toward my grandmother’s yard, and stopped right at the corner of her house. We sort of had that feeling that mom and grandma might be nearby and we told them we missed them. Not unusual to see deer, but in the middle of the day, in the middle of a busy road and they end up in my grandmas’ yard, that felt like confirmation, like the spirits knew exactly why we were there.

Inside

The handyman couldn’t get the front door open, so we went around to the basement instead. Those stairs used to scare me as a kid, and stepping down into that dank, familiar smell brought it all back immediately. My uncle used to keep shields and other props down there that he’d bought from the set of Ben Hur, things we were absolutely not allowed to touch, even while we were down there playing pool most weekends. I have no idea what happened to any of it, but I still think about those props sitting in the dark all these years.

He turned on the lights, and we started making our way from room to room, telling stories. That’s when the lights started flickering. He looked around, confused, asking what was going on. We knew. We didn’t say much about it out loud, but all four of us knew exactly why those lights were doing what they were doing.

We went upstairs into the living room, where we’d had a hundred Christmases. The hooks on the mantel, the ones we used to hang our stockings from, were still there. Never removed.

In the dining room, where every big birthday and every holiday happened, not the kitchen table, this table, the good one, the hooks that once held a big wooden spoon and fork were still on the wall too. There was never an assigned seat at that table. Whoever got there first got their pick, and the birthday cake always sat in the middle on the lazy susan so everyone could spin it around for the best view of the candles.

What I Actually Learned after Going Back To Your Childhood home

It was hard to leave, knowing we’d probably never get the chance again. But what surprised me most wasn’t that the house hadn’t changed. It was what I realized about the four of us standing in it.

We’d all been in the same rooms, growing up, but we didn’t all carry the same memories out of them. Some of what we remembered was difficult. And yet, standing there together, I understood that it didn’t matter whether every memory was a good one. What mattered was honoring who we were when we were small, and honoring the place where those memories grew up.

One Last Stop

On the way to the airport, just me and one sister left, we made a detour. Growing up, going out to eat was a big deal, not something we did often, and Frisch’s Big Boy was always the place, the treat, the special-occasion spot. So we stopped in for old times sake and got a cup of chili, the same thing we used to order as kids. It tasted exactly like it used to.

So here’s what I’m asking you. Is there a place still living in your memory that you long to go back to? A friend or a relative you’ve lost touch with, who might still be there if you reached out?

Go do it. Go back and experience it again, however it turns out.

Come float with me.

Want to read more stories from my life experiences? Go check out how I found my biological father after a 57 year secret. Or go read about what life was like when I grew up on a pig farm.