House. Home. Rooms. Walls. Gone.
A part of me didn’t want to go back. The house had been emptied without my input, and I was gutted. My childhood and family’s history had been packed up and hauled away in cardboard boxes and overstuffed black trash bags, and I wanted to punish the place by turning my back on it completely. But it wasn’t the house’s fault, poor thing. It was suffering from decades of deferred maintenance—a cracked and uneven driveway, obvious termite damage on the once-bright white siding, now coated in a pale, honeydew-colored fungus. The roof was clumped with pine needles from a canopy so thick and towering you couldn't even see the house on Google Earth. The fact that I had occasionally sought out a bird’s eye view of my childhood home from 3000 miles away like some sort of sentimental stalker made it quite obvious. I had to go back. One last time.
It was my best friend Cathy’s idea to hold a séance. Naturally, because nothing says "spiritual closure" quite like a trip to Harris Teeter, we made a stop on our way. While I was inside buying flowers for the neighbors who had found my father on his bathroom floor, Cathy was in the car executing her master plan with a pack of note cards and a sharpie.
When we pulled into the cul-de-sac, a housekeeper was prepping the place for the market. Sensing the heavy, holy weirdness of what we were about to do, she graciously offered to give us an hour and left to get lunch.
Cathy and I walked through the empty rooms. It is a cruel trick of architecture that a house always looks so much smaller without the things in it that made it a home. There, on the two steps leading from the entry hall to the living room, is where I sat as my mother buckled my Mary Janes before I ran out to catch the ice cream truck with a quarter clutched in each fist. There, to the right, was the space for great aunt Ethel‘s baby grand piano which I only practiced once a week one hour before my lessons. Across the hall is the kitchen from which the scent of gingerbread heralded the holidays, and to the left was the home of the hutch which was filled with grandma‘s rarely used China and the chowder pot from the Amish country where mom hid her stash of the Good Halloween candy.
We eventually settled on the floor of the den, surrounded by blank bookshelves and the ghosts of old arguments and unresolved issues. In the center of our circle, we lit a candle and set out a bottle of André champagne and a box of Hostess Twinkies—a high-fructose communion to the girls we once were, in a place that had been part of our foundation.
Cathy revealed her note cards. She had written out five stacks based on the themes: HOUSE, HOME, ROOMS, WALLS, and GONE. Beneath each category were cards with rhyming words meant to trigger immediate, unfiltered memories.
For example, under HOUSE was soused—a direct callback to the night we drank too much André and accidentally stumbled into the grandfather clock in the entry hall, desperately trying to muffle the midnight chimes before my parents woke up.
Under HOME was styrofoam, which brought back memories of the legendary broken surfboard my brother and I discovered snapped in half on a sand dune at Emerald Isle, turning it into makeshift marshmallow-colored kick-boards that we used for years before handing them down to the next generation of siblings.
Under ROOMS was looms, recalling the dozens of neon loop potholders we meticulously wove and then tried, completely unsuccessfully, to hawk at our neighborhood lemonade stands.
For WALLS, one prompt was brawls. I immediately pictured the literal wrestling matches my brother and I had on this very carpet—a blood-sport fueled entirely by me wanting to watch Luke and Laura on General Hospital while he demanded time with Fred and Barney from The Flintstones.
We laughed until the empty rooms echoed, our voices bouncing off the bare wood paneling. But as we reached the final stack—GONE—the laughter quieted. The prompts began to pull at the real weight in the room. We looked around at the clean squares on the walls where pictures used to hang, the indentations in the carpet where a couch had lived for nearly 60 years, and the absolute silence where my father's voice used to be. The house wasn't just empty; it was waiting for a new family’s timeline to begin.
We blew out the candles, brushed the Twinkie crumbs off our laps, and left the key on the kitchen counter. I didn't need to look the house up on Google Earth anymore. The canopy above could hide it from the rest of the world all it wanted, but I finally knew in my heart exactly how to find it.
As shared at Story Salon on October 7, 2026.
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