Expectations vs Reality

Hi friends,

Every once in a while, I go on Zillow and look for pictures of the houses I lived in as a child. We moved five times by the time I was in high school, and I can see the unrealistically-staged and fish-eye lensed pictures of the inside of most of them. Except one. Except my favorite.

The longest I lived anywhere, except for now Brooklyn, was in Winston-Salem, NC from the time I was in second grade until after my freshman year of high school. It was a long stretch for us McKeans. And we lived in the most North Carolina-style upper middle class home you can imagine: Carolina brick, dormer windows, black shutters.

It had the steepest driveway imaginable and only the bravest of my friends went down it on their Big Wheels or sitting on a skateboard. My bedroom had a window seat in one of those dormers. We had a finished basement the size of a football field where I played hours and hours of Nintendo and listened to the Beatles albums my dad had recorded on a 7 in. reel to reel. I played both so much there are certain levels of Mario Bros. I associate with certain Beatles albums. It was a big house and I rattled around in it after my parents divorced and my siblings went to college. But I loved that house. It's the one I visit most often in my dreams.

Nothing on Zillow, though. The current owners lived in it for twenty years, so there were no listing photos for me to spy on, just an exterior shot. The trees had grown so much taller. They built a fence. There was a faux barn looking shed at the bottom of the driveway (even though the garage was huge but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). That is, until last night, when I entered in the address, which of course I still remember, zip code and all, and I discovered it was not only listed for sale, but recently sold. This summer. I couldn't click fast enough.

There it was. My childhood home. They replaced all the carpets, of course. The countertops were different in the kitchen and gone was the very 80s-coded desk in the kitchen where hypothetically a mom could write checks and pay the bills. It was mostly where the pens and the scissors were for us. They took out most of the mullions on the windows, which seems dangerous to the area birds in that wooded backyard, imho. My bedroom was made into their home office. I didn't remember the skylight in the bathroom I shared with my sister. They didn't show the big closet in my brother's room, which I moved into after he went to college because it had the en suite bathroom, and the Kate was here I carved in the drywall on the day we moved out. Unless they painted the inside of the closet, it's still there. And yes, if still lived in NC and saw the listing, I would have asked to view it and checked.

But it isn't my home anymore. Of course I knew it would look different. Our orange velveteen couch is not in the living room. They took down the wallpaper in the powder room. The basement is not actually the size of a football field. I was just very small back then, and everything was bigger. The house. My family. The world. I have been waiting for this day for a long time, to see the inside of this house, heightened by nostalgia and the fact that I couldn't see inside it like all the other houses we lived in. And of course, I'm disappointed this morning. Because I didn't just want to see inside the house; I wanted to go back in time to living there. See the scenes of my life like a movie, hear the voices. Maybe I should have realized that's what I really wanted, but I didn't know until I got there, until I saw the previous owners horrible taste in furniture and all the decorative baskets everywhere. That the shelves my dad built weren't in the basement anymore. That the garage inexplicably had a fireplace that none of us remember. I wanted a fantasy and a memory together, but what I got was reality. It's just a house. And I've always had my memories.

Here's why this is like writing and publishing. You're going to write a book and it's