The last time I went to California, I drove past the house where I grew up. It had only been a few months since my mom had left, moving two dogs, an ornery cat and twenty-seven years’ worth of stuff into a two-room cottage with thirty-days’ notice, but the property already looked, not just neglected—but trashed. There were no curtains in the windows and a few of the window panes had been pulled clear off. The cabinet where we had stored our spices, flour, tea—it seemed like everything—was on its side in the front yard. My mom’s garden, cultivated in fits and starts over decades, was a tangle of weeds crawling up the fence my father had built from spare wood to keep our dogs in and the horses out. There was a car missing half its tires in the driveway, but that was nothing new. Once it had been our car, and my dad had had to cut away a wall of rose bush to unbury that car, which hadn’t started in months.

I didn’t just grow up in that house, I moved back in after college and lived there with my mother through the pandemic. We cooked meals together, drank boxed wine in the garden which we expanded that year, adding raised beds, hauling wheelbarrow loads of manure from the landlord’s barn, repotting and fertilizing Trader Joe’s roses. I listened to The Portrait of a Lady on audiobook for hours as I repotted roses.

A year-and-a-half after I left again—this time to Washington D.C.—I was back in town for Christmas and to get married at the Santa Rosa courthouse. I was staying at my husband’s parents’ house, which was bigger and with more privacy, when my mom called one evening, saying her landlord’s house was on fire. He was an ancient man, a mentally unstable menace who looms in my childhood memories as the angry old conspiracy theorist who banged on our door on Christmas day demanding rent, whose pack of rogue hounds terrorized me as a toddler, who once, when I was a teenager, wandered onto our porch and played me a song on my guitar that stunned me with its skill and musicality.

He survived the fire after a trip to the emergency room, but the fear, of course, was my mom’s uncertain housing, now that her landlord was essentially homeless.

My memory of the house, which still feels instinctively like home, includes the sometimes terrifying, sometimes comical (such as when he burned piles of brush in a field behind my bedroom window and his pants would fall around his knees without him noticing) landlord, the horses that appeared in our yard after someone left the gate unlatched, the constant water shut offs when the landlord underpaid an amateur handyman to tinker with the well, but what dominates are the memories without the landlord, without the crazy neighbors, just my family and me and the magical universe I thought was the world.

It’s the bedroom I shared with my older sister, which, one or both of us—or maybe it was my father’s idea—would decide to rearrange every couple of years, making it wholly new. It’s the Lazure paint job on the walls of the living room and kitchen, the colors fading and blending with the movement of light. It’s the smell of pine, the voice of Kathleen Battle, the warmth from our fireplace reinforced with tinfoil at Christmas, the excitement I could hardly bear. It’s the trampoline in the backyard under two giant redwoods and an elderberry tree which got the birds drunk and raucous once a year. One of its branches grew at the perfect height and stability for our young legs to spring off of onto the trampoline, where we created our own worlds within the greater one we believed in—continued to believe in, but perhaps a little less when my sister outgrew our make-believe games and got older friends and grew too big for the Coleman cooler and the sprinkler to be our water park. We had chickens and rabbits, rats, mice, a cockatiel (who stayed with us long after she died, forgotten in the freezer), multiple generations of lovebirds, snakes we “rescued,” dogs, cats—enough to fill the animal graveyard behind the fence. It smelled of horse urine when one aging mare parked herself day after day in the same spot in our driveway, the fertilizer they sprayed on the grape vines down the street, apple blossoms and my mom’s flowers and vegetables. It smelled like green and wild growth, everything unkempt, just barely held at bay, and I always missed this when, elsewhere, the landscapes were so perfectly tended. My parents blasted world trance music like the hippies they were, when they weren’t making music of their own. My mom sang opera, jazz and the soprano part of the choir pieces she directed twice a week at the Episcopal church in Santa Rosa. My sister and I practiced piano and I punched a duffel bag stuffed with pillows one summer until my knuckles bled.

It was a house we patched year after year—the landlord didn’t fix much but in twenty-seven years he never once raised the rent, in one of the most expensive counties in the country. One summer we moved all of the furniture into the kitchen to sand the wood floors and paint the bedrooms. Later, when I moved back in after college, Mom paid for the linoleum in the kitchen to be replaced with cork. We gave back to that house and loved it in the ways we could.

It’s the food we shared in our tiny, crowded kitchen, it tastes of Papa Murphy’s pizza on Friday night, Thanksgiving turkey and Easter ham and the beers I came to love in the years after my dad left.

It was in the living room, maybe I sat on the soft Persian rug or the couch, gritty from the constant dirt the dogs tracked in—the same room our parents led us into with our eyes covered on Christmas morning to reveal the scene they had crafted the night before, dolls and guitars and a mountain of gifts they couldn’t afford—that my dad called a family meeting and told us he couldn’t be with our mom anymore. I was fifteen but I guess I was still the little girl I had always been in that house, the younger sister.

My sister soon returned to college, my dad to his friend’s house, and it was the sound of my mom crying in her bedroom at night, the not knowing what to say, how to lessen her pain.

For a long time it was this. Sad, even when I came home a college graduate. But Covid hit and we were stuck there and so it reshaped. We rebuilt and I loved it again. I drank and dried out, high on one and then the other.

It was not until February, six weeks after I moved to North Carolina to live with my husband, that my mom received her notice to vacate. My husband would be gone for two weeks anyway, so I flew back to help. My drinking was bad in this new place of the Marine Corps and loneliness.

My mom and I combed through our lives and I was unsentimental. Her nostalgia and reluctance to give up every little thing brought out my ruthlessness. This was not my house but a deadline, bordering on a crisis. Now I was the one burning cabinets and splintered bed frames in the field out back until the woman who tended the horses told me the cops would come and give us a fine.

It was sitting before the fireplace in the near-empty living room, burning artwork—Mom’s oil portraits from grad school and my Waldorf school pastels—that she asked me when I planned to finally give up drinking. What would I get out of carrying on for another few years, as I claimed I wanted? Would it get any better?

I decided the next morning that it wouldn’t and the following week, back in North Carolina, I walked into a meeting and got a white chip and a sponsor.

When my mom returned to that house one last time to check that it was empty, the house smelled like pot. The receipt for the water heater she’d replaced had disappeared from the counter where she’d left it. The neighbors we’d worked hard to maintain a distant peace with had let themselves in.

It’s something else now, I don’t know what. Someday, maybe not too long from now, it will be knocked down, and it will be nothing.

– Mira Wade