Posts tagged when i was her age I worked retail too

I looked at the sentence and thought - what is an “are” house?  Did she me art? Was I missing something hipster? Was I out of the loop? Or had my 27 year old sister decided that this photo caption on Facebook was her opportunity to showcase her education.

The grammar bothered me.  

Normally I would roll my eyes and move on, but then I looked closer, and it was a house I had never seen before.

That is not the front of our house.

I realized that it was the front of the house across the street from her grandparents house.

Twenty years ago, her mother loaded up her car and a small trailer and moved 140 miles south, from Tacoma to Portland and into the home that my father has owned since before I was born.   Twenty years ago, my home became her home, her house, and she has lived there since. 

She never went away to school. She never got an apartment on her own and moved out. Since that day in August, when she arrived in the family room with her Barbies in tow and moved into the room that was once my brothers, the house I grew up in has been her home.

She has lived there longer than I ever did. Slept more nights under that roof, felt the frame sway and heard the creaks as the East Wind bellows against her bedroom wall.

The front of our house.

It seems like although she has no plans to leave, no plans to move out, no aspirations of getting a job, having a family, having a career, just continuing to work at Blockbuster until there are no Blockbusters left, watching her friends move forward in their lives, and she comes home, unlocks the same door with the same key in the same lock that she has since she was 7 and sleeps in the same room under the same roof between the same walls - but somehow that place is not her house.

That structure is not her home. 

After all these years, it seems like a rejection of our family.  Like we were a placeholder for a Seven year old who always wanted to know when she was moving back to Tacoma, to her Grandparents, and it makes me sad. 

Unless I am wrong, and reading too much into things and it really was hipster code for art house and in that suburban track home across the street from her grandparents is an underground graphic novel hideaway.

In which case, she shouldn’t post its whereabouts on Facebook.