corporate entertainment: Door No. 1: The Little Red House on the Hill

I cleared my throat.

?I?m Mary Lauren. This sounds a bit strange, but I lived here in this house until 1983. I was born here. Well, not here, in the hospital, but you know what I mean.?

My husband interrupted me. ?Just tell them what you want. Be nice, but they don?t need your life history,? he said.

?Ok, true.? I started over.

?Hi, I actually used to live in this house when I was a little girl. Would you mind if I took a few photographs? I don?t need to come in.?

?Better,? Matt told me. ?But I think you need to say why you need to take the pictures.?

This had been a sticking point. I was of the belief that as soon as I said the words ?internet? and ?blog? I?d have a door slammed promptly in my face. I?d planned to lie, a little white lie, really, and say that I was taking the pictures for a family scrapbook. Matt, always my moral superior, had disagreed.

Later that day as I drove up the winding hill I still wasn?t certain what I?d say. I just knew this: that I?d park my car where the old evergreen used to drop its needles on the drive. I?d walk past the mailbox where I?d once proudly placed a handwritten letter to my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Taylor, then up exactly 26 stairs. I?d walk across the spot where my Granddad had chopped a snake in two with a ax, then flung its body unceremoniously in the brush.

I?d approach the door. I?d knock. And the rest, as they say, would be history.

A few weeks before I?d declared that in 2013 I?d visit every home where I?d ever lived? 16 in all, spanning three states. It was an idea that had been inexplicably nagging at me, the way one might feel about quitting smoking or forwarding the laundry at 11 pm: like it or not, it simply had to be done.

At 35 I realized that I was approaching half time in my life, with as many years behind me as I?d likely have in front.? I was no longer filled with the self-doubt and insecurities of young adulthood. I was finally settled into the rhythms of family life. I?d reached a point professionally that finally felt like more than treading water. I was happily married, a mother to 3, and engaged in meaningful work as a freelance writer.

There was another side to the story, though.

I?d spent many years running from the truth. I?d lived a life based not in the reality of how things were, but in the fantasyland of how I?d wanted them to be instead. The truth was this: I had a master?s degree I wasn?t using, despite the student loan bill I paid on the 15th of every month. Four years earlier I?d quit my job as a social worker to become a stay at home mom, leaving me restless and unfulfilled. I?d started a blog about those experiences and begun writing in the margins of my days, and the words had unearthed one hundred wounds. Somehow, visiting the 16 places I?d called home would be my saving grace. I just knew it.

I just didn?t know what to say to the person on the other side of that door.

Door Number 1

When my children were learning to count we made constant inventories of everything: How many raisins are in your bowl? One, two, three, four. Yes! There are four raisins! Coins, cookies?it didn?t matter. One of our favorite games had been counting each stair step we walked, saying the number in a sing-songy tone. I?d permanently filed the totals away in my mind? there were five steps to the front porch, for example, but only three down the back deck? despite the fact that I?d often forget more important numbers (my own cell phone number among them).? And so it was that I knew there were exactly 26 steps to the little red house on the hill from the driveway below.

It had been 30 years since I?d climbed those stairs.

When I pulled onto that dead-end street the first thing I?d noticed was the absence of a car in the driveway. I was relieved by the thought that there was likely no one at home.? Still, my pulse quickened as I counted, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and finally, twenty-six.

The front door was blocked with two little chairs and a patio table. It was clear that this was no longer the main entrance to the house. I paused to run my hands across the wrought-iron banister.

At age four, I?d opened the door from the living room, stepped onto the concrete slab of a porch, and gripped that same banister in my tiny hand. Inside that little red house on the hill I?d been an only child surrounded by adults. The carpet was shag, pea-green. The radio blared unceasingly in the kitchen. This is my first memory. I wish I was nine, I thought.

From my twin-sized bed as a child I could hear the whistle of the coal train and the shusshing of the cars on the highway heading out of town. Sometimes when I stood in the front yard of that little red house on the hill I could see a trail of airplane smoke criss-crossing the sky. I bet if I?d climbed the water tower that loomed above my neighborhood I?d have been able to see the river in the valley below. It, too, snaked its way to other places.

I spent my childhood on the hillside, barefoot and full of wonder at the woods around me. The leaves my mother could strip down to the veins. The flowers that grew wild on the hillside. I wondered at the neighbors, too: the elderly couple whose house always smelled of burnt coffee. The little boy next door whose father was there one day, gone the next. Brain cancer, I?d heard my parents whisper across the kitchen table.

A dog barked inside. There was another door on the side of the house, off the kitchen where I?d once eaten friend bologna sandwiches at a round wooden table. It?s funny the things you remember: the box of N?ICE throat lozenges in a drawer. The time I wrapped a pickle with lunchmeat and called it gourmet. The way my Granddad kept tomatoes in a tiny plot of land just outside the window, a far cry from the Kentucky tobacco farm he?d been forced to give up.

I made my way to the kitchen door. I rang the bell, made the dog bark more. A little sign read, ?Peace to all who enter here.? No one answered.

We moved from that house when I was just six. I remember the day the moving truck came, the way the men had complained about all those steps. My Granddad would soon move into a nursing home. Before long I?d have not one younger sibling, but two. I?d switch schools, make new friends.

As I grew my life expanded, but in my early childhood that house was the anchor to my world. Seeing it now, the same age my mother was when she lived there, was bittersweet.

I took a moment to say goodbye. I thought of the family living there now, wondered what their story was. I thought about that sign on the door, and all the lives that had passed through its threshold.

I thought of who I was at 6, the last time I said goodbye, and who I?d become in the decades since.

I thought of the long journey ahead. There were 15 doors still waiting.

This is the first essay in a series called The 16 Doors Project. Click here to read more.

A big thanks to Go Mighty and Olay for making this possible.

Photo Credit: Kara, June & Bear