My childhood house

Our first home acts as a blueprint for how we understand and experience all future spaces. How we move through spaces. Where we feel comfort or discomfort. How we organize our adult homes. 

I love how the book the “The poetics of space” describes it:

“The house we were born in is an inhabited house. […] But over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits.

After twenty years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways, we would recapture the reflexes of the "first stairway," we would not stumble on that rather high step. The house's entire being would open up, faithful to our own being. We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in the dark to the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands.

The successive houses in which we have lived have no doubt made our gestures commonplace. But we are very surprised, when we return to the old house, after an odyssey of many years, to find that the most delicate gestures, the earliest gestures suddenly come alive, are still faultless. In short, the house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. 

Reading Bachelard and "The House of Breath" has awakened these memories. I expect I'll write more about homes - I'm reading deeply about them now and have my own curriculum.

But for now, let me revisit my childhood house.

So let's go together to 1996,

The house opened its door to our world: in we ushered and unloaded all of us, the heavy parts and weightless ones. Our young bones, our soft flesh, our vast dreams. We were there.

Below is my first photo in the house: gripping my younger brother. It was the first time we had stairs in a house. I was so worried he would fall on the stairs and die.

And here were said stairs.....

that house had two of them!

All my fashion mistakes happened in that house (or at least the majority of them).

My interior design mistakes too.

We played a lot.

And then the next generation arrived, and played some more

Below is the last photo I have of myself in the house. By 2017, when it was sold, I hadn't known my final visit would be my last. I never got to say goodbye - I can't even recall my last night there.

And just like that, in 2017, the same doors that welcomed us in 1996 opened one last time, and all that our family was - rubbish of stars and souls - was swept outside the house, so that another family could enter and the cycle could begin anew.