The Old House

We all have an ‘Old House.’ That repository of childhood memories–both real and imagined–that remains forever situated someplace between the fuzzy, soft haze of imagination and the hard, unyielding truth of reality.

My Old House was on Seven Mile Road–an isolated, lonely little stretch of few inhabitants in one of South Carolina’s abundant rural areas. That Old House holds my first vivid memories, acting as a key to the formative parts of my life. It is the place I first remember laughing, as well as crying, a place of endless balances of joy, sorrow, and growth. It’s funny thinking about Old Houses. You think you have forgotten so much of your life until you are reminded of the place that cultivated them. Almost all at once, even the most insignificant memories come flooding back into the mind’s citadel of knowledge–leaving you awash in past experiences.

I remember the day we met the Old House. After starting our lives in a more suburban apartment, my parents, sister, and I found ourselves moving to our new home, far from the bustling traffic and noise. From the outside it was not a very impressive or beautiful building, as if the architect had decided to make the most boring and uninspired house imaginable. The house was built like an emaciated man–flat and thin–and looked as if a stiff breeze could blow it over. It was also overwhelmingly brown, painted in sickly shades of pale browns and beiges. Inside our new home were three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a living room that felt so limitless in its size. After our unpleasant first impression, the home slowly embraced me, nurturing me to truly become who I was meant to be–but it was rarely without resistance or struggle. Looking back, it almost impossible that so much time has separated myself from the child that moved into that house. A child who had just begun navigating the world unknown to him. A child not yet stripped of his innocence. I lived in those walls from kindergarten to the beginning of high school–around eight years–and our Old House acted as the stage for many of the impactful moments of my life. It was also where I met the one greatest friend of my childhood, Jalen. Many of the memories of that time in our house involve him and his family to the point that he felt tied to the life lived inside.

Being situated in the wilderness like we were meant that few times my parents were able to kick up the money for the internet resulted in a virtually non- responsive, lethargic online experience. The old, thin man that was our home demanded the quiet escapism of the rural area to continue–and anything modern or new was to die. So, that Old House inadvertently helped me in discovering my first passions. My love for basketball came from watching NBA games on the ground, right in front of the antennaed-TV set on the floor alongside us. Jalen and I sat there, glued to the screen, only speaking to discuss the events of the game itself. My lifelong love for reading blossomed in every room of that Old House. I read from the morning to far past bedtime for an escape from the limited scope of the world we had, but this only grew my mental citadel–inspiring my love for ideas, and leading me to writing this. The sheer influence that even just a house can express–as if the emaciated man was a wise mentor–has become wondrous to me. If I had lived anywhere else, perhaps my interests would have been entirely different, or my memories no longer my own. Maybe the Old House would have formed a completely different person than who I am now.

But at the time, I couldn’t feel this way. I felt trapped and stifled by the Old House, like it was a blanket grown overheated or a relative who held embraces for far too long. The safety it provided was also a prison for me in many aspects. The isolated countryside was so full of life during the day, but at night, it was lonely and empty–devoid of the life that humans crave so deeply. This sterile environment without any excitement, which I felt was the primary objective for little boys to obtain, felt horrible to me. I relished the one year reprieve we had when we moved to an apartment in the city, but we quickly returned back
to that same Old House.

I soon moved back into the rhythms of rural life and the warmth–both figuratively and literally–of that Old House. I’d always battled with the heat of living as a Southerner, with times the air conditioner failed turning our home into a sauna. I felt grateful that my family and I filled the house with our own warmth, as the house was too frugal a man–never giving us more than needed. Now that holds a sort of charm for me; simple living for simpler times. A realization only made through nostalgia-fueled perspectives. Nostalgia can paint pictures out of nothing with colors that have yet to be discovered, but any narrative recounting of the past demands a sober dose of reality to avoid the creation of a hagiography of memories that may
not have truly happened.

It was in that Old House where I first truly became aware of racism. The old TV, sat on the floor amongst toys and books, often provided a window into the wider world away from the protective shell of the Old House. While we lived in a shielded sense of safety removed from society, the noise-cancellation of the troubles in the world slowly seeped into the floorboards. The murder of a seventeen year old boy in 2012 was my first encounter with racism and injustice. I remember my Father wearing a hoodie in the rain in solidarity with the boy who was slain. I remember feeling so confident that Trayvon Martin’s murderer was going to be decided as guilty, but when the official verdict was broadcasted, the foundations of the dream I had been living in shook beneath the Old House. That was my first introduction to the adult world. I was given a choice–as I feel we all are when we become aware–to let it break us or to persevere. I chose the latter.

The Old House became a comfort. To have a place truly safe, with distance from many of the harmful parts of the world as children growing into their adolescent and teenage years was essential to growing and becoming who my sister and I were meant to be. However, as I grew closer to the house, inevitably the fruit of my Mother’s labors in completing her nursing degree were finally ripe enough to be picked. After toiling for years in servicework, she could finally do something meaningful to her–that made her happy. My sister and I were happy and despite everything we struggled with, we did not despair often. We had food, water, and a house that had provided us with so much beyond mere shelter. But, was a haven of so many years in the beginnings of its hermitage. The three of us eventually left the emaciated old man of a house, that tiny sickly brown building left in our little isolated stretch of wilderness traded for the almost-disorienting urban haze of the city with all its amenities and bland safety. As if sledding the skin of the countryside for a life of unfamiliar safety, when I eventually left that place it felt as though I was leaving Jalen behind in that Old House too, and we inevitably drifted apart as we walked separate paths of life. Jalen, even now, proves to me that relationships that have been long abandoned can still be affected years later; the memories of halcyon days gone seemingly remembered as easily as the events of yesterday.

Friendships are much like how Shakespeare described life: a poor player who frets his hour upon the stage. I chose not to do that to preserve the memory of my friendship with Jalen, and I attempted the same task with the house. I tried my best to not give into nostalgia, to leave the place on a good note and not one contaminated with sadness’s cold embrace, but this eternal task was far more difficult than I would have thought as a child in that old, frail home.

We abandoned our home of nearly a decade after the school year ended in the summer of 2016. We returned to the city–back to the Florence apartment we had briefly lived in before–with many rooms to finally be filled with new memories. Nine years have passed with my Mother, sister, and I living in this house. While I love living here, sometimes in the quiet hours of the night–just as the sun begins the morning–I ponder that old abandoned house in that isolated, lonely stretch and I begin to remember it all again. The times that were had, the days that seemed like they would never end, the nights where you could hear all the creatures of humid, Southern nights, the friendships long past, and the worries long forgotten for new ones. I remember all of the memories made in that Old House and I smile.