Thomas Wolfe Was Right: You Really Can't Go Home Again

Houses are fickle. You build a comprehensive mental scrapbook of early-life memories in a place you call Home. Then one day this beloved structure gets re-sold to a group of strangers. You heave a sigh of reminiscence. The pink bedroom. The echoes of laughter from your 6th grade Halloween party. The family hand prints in red enamel paint, pressed onto the walls leading to the basement, and the backyard badminton games, played late into the evening. Those quaint marble windowsills.

But the house? It brazenly welcomes the newbies with open doors, as all traces of your family's occupancy are being callously erased, one by one.

My formative years were spent in Royal Oak, Michigan. I loved my time there. And I adored our charming three-bedroom colonial, with a towering maple tree by the curb and a tidy fenced-in back yard.

Thirty-five years after my nuclear family's relocation to Minneapolis, I took a trip back and toured the old neighborhood with dear friends I'd known since 4th grade. Aside from the dear friend part, this adventure gradually turned into a horror story.

Prior to my Memory Lane excursion, I'd written to the current owners to let them know we might be strolling by, but not to worry: I was simply a sentimental former resident sneaking a glimpse of the old homestead. When we showed up on the appointed day, the occupants graciously invited us inside. Turns out they were eager to quiz me about how the house was supposed to look, because the guy they bought it from had reconfigured it past recognition, destroying its most endearing elements in the process.

The Cowboy. That's what the current owner had dubbed the interim owner, who had installed swinging saloon doors between all the lower-level rooms.

But worse surprises were in store, such as a cantilevered one-room extension, upper-level rear, to accommodate a massive anachronism of a spa-style bathroom. The Cowboy had also knocked out the wall between the two smaller bedrooms to create an awkward ("impossible to furnish") oblong, transforming the place into an unmarketable two bedroom in the process.

As a finishing flourish, the ol' buckaroo removed the garage door and bricked in that wall. (No more protected parking!) The madman now had a workshop—the perfect dark and gloomy retreat for fashioning all those swinging doors and a ghastly plywood front to obscure the once-lovely living room hearth.

This, I'm sure, is an extreme example of New Owner Malpractice. Still, there oughta be a law against heartlessly robbing someone of their idyllic childhood memories. Fortunately, there is no statute of limitations that applies to bloggers with old resentments. And I submit that the internet would be a dull and Pollyanna-ish place if it were suddenly barren of all griping.

Maybe you can sympathize. Surely the world needs more militant defenders of marble windowsills!