A (bonus, beachy) place to call home
We had just backed out of the driveway when my grandma, from the middle seat of the van, said, “Oh, we forgot to take our picture!”
It was about 12:40 p.m., and we had a 12-hour drive from her house in Jacksonville, Florida, back to my childhood home in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Because of a scheduling mishap with a moving company, we were leaving much later in the day than we normally would.
We had forgotten the family tradition: to take a picture on the front porch of my grandparents’ house on the last morning of our visits. The earliest such picture I can find is fall break 2010; there’s one picture of me and my three siblings with our parents, and another of the four of us with Gram and Pop.
The photos have changed because we’ve changed, of course — in that first picture my brother is a bleach-blonde toddler and now he’s a 14-year-old body-builder. They also sometimes featured additional people, whomever we brought along on vacation: my middle school best friend and high school boyfriend, my grandmother from the other side of the family, my college newspaper co-workers.
But the most significant and most devastating change: Pop has been missing from every front porch photo since he died on November 8, 2019.
Since then, Gram has spent most of her time at the house she and Pop had just recently built in Kentucky, on the land where Pop grew up, where they planned to retire. Last week’s trip was the seventh time I’ve taken Gram back to her Florida home since Pop died.
All of those trips had some of the same objectives: pack some stuff up, grieve, go the beach. Other plans have depended on who else made the trip. This time, it was the granddaughters and the boyfriends.
I brought my boyfriend Michael, who had visited the house twice before Pop died and once since. My younger sisters, Ashtyn and Cayden, brought their boyfriends, David and Owen, neither of whom had been there.
That was the objective: Let them see the Florida house that has been like a second home for our entire lives. (Since my grandparents moved there for work in 2000, our family went for vacation between one and three times a year.) Gram is planning to sell the house later this year, and for David and Owen to never visit would be missing out on a big part of my sisters’ childhoods.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of home recently — probably mostly because I’m one year post-graduation, and I lived with my parents again during quarantine before moving into my first apartment on my own. A chapter about home in Rainesford Stauffer’s recently released book, An Ordinary Age, also really resonated with me.
Rainesford, whom I know through social media and feel close to because we’re both Kentuckians, wrote about “rootedness, feeling settled.” That’s always been my favorite part of vacationing at my grandparents’ house: It feels just like home, just closer to the ocean.
That house is part of me like Gram and Pop are, woven into my DNA and my habits. On the drive there and back, I always looked first for a Love’s or Pilot — because I hear Pop’s voice saying those are the best gas stations. The back bedroom — which there’s some disagreement about, because Gram calls it the front bedroom — was mine for a whole summer, when I interned at the Jacksonville paper. There are pictures of my family members everywhere, including one that shows Gram, then a secretary, with a typewriter-shaped cake. My sixteenth birthday cake, which Gram ordered and we ate together at the house, was also a typewriter.
It’s hard to imagine letting that house go. I don’t want a beach vacation at a hotel or resort; I want a beach vacation at the house where we lit sparklers on the back porch and watched Jeopardy! on the couch. And so many of my memories of Pop are in that house — how he’d joke he was wearing a Speedo to the beach but that was just the brand of his water shoes; how he’d fall asleep at night with a paperback thriller fallen on his chest; how he said good night to me, Gram and Ashtyn the last time I ever saw him.
I feel rooted at that house — we all do — and I know that saying goodbye to it will feel like uprooting an important part of us. But luckily, thankfully, we all have other places to call home, plus the ability to — together — make new places into homes. And we will carry that house with us always, just like we already carry Pop.
As Michael stopped the car at the end of the driveway, waiting to see if he needed to pull back in, I said, “Oh, do we want to go take it? Everyone will have to climb out again.” (Normally I’m a stickler for traditions — the day before, when Ashtyn and David left, I had taken their front porch photo with Gram — but all I could think about was the 669 miles of driving ahead of us.)
“Yes, let’s do it,” Gram said. “We’ll regret it if we don’t.”
So we parked the car and I balanced my phone on the hood to take a timed picture. We put our arms around each other and smiled on the porch, adding another photo to our collection.
Then we drove away, toward the other places we call home.
