This week marks fourteen years since I moved into the house I’m in here in Palmetto Bay.  It’s the longest I’ve lived at one address since I moved out of my parents’ house in Perrysburg.  And that reminded me that it was sixty-five years ago this week that we moved into the house where I grew up.

I was almost five years old when we arrived from St. Louis and settled into this house that was built in 1872 in what was called the Victorian Gothic Cottage style. It had high ceilings, fireplaces in practically every room on the first floor, including the kitchen, and a big back yard with a separate garage, which I assume had been the carriage house. There were six of us: Mom and Dad, and the four kids all under the age of ten, and it was perfect for a family our size. There were lots of kids in the neighborhood. In fact, on the first morning we were there, a little boy knocked on the front door and asked if I wanted to come out and play. We’re still friends to this day.

My parents did a lot of renovations, including landscaping and adding a pool, but the character of the house never changed, and when they sold it in 1982 and moved to Michigan, the new owners kept it pretty much as we had left it, and in the years since it has — at least on the outside — remained the same.

I’ve moved a lot since 1971 when I went off to college, but as I noted in August 2013 when my parents, after returning to a new place in Perrysburg, moved to a retirement community in Cincinnati, Perrysburg will always be my hometown, and that house the place I will remember as where I grew up.

I love where I live now, but being an elderly single guy, I don’t know the neighbors like I might if I had a family with kids.  And there’s not a sense of grounding that I had in that old house on Front Street.  Maybe it’s because the last fourteen years haven’t seen me grow from a kindergartner to a college freshman and all the changes that come with that, both physically and otherwise.  That’s what made that house a home, with all the things that come with it.

This bit of nostalgia was sparked by a chance reading of a post by a friend from Perrysburg reminiscing about Memorial Day and a comment by one of his friends, who turned out to be someone who lived next door but moving out almost as we were moving in in June 1957.  And the coincidence — or karma — of hearing from him on the anniversary of both living in my house here in Miami and moving to Perrysburg struck me as good timing on the part of the universe.