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#1

Whenever someone asks me where home is I immediately think of my parents house in West Lebanon, NH. We moved there when I was 4 and I have lived there until this past summer when I moved into my first apartment, so it has always been where I called home.

It is an older house that still has a lot of the push button lights. My dad’s great aunt helped her father build the house in 1913. It is a Victorian style house, with 2 floors, along with a basement and attic. The outside is now painted brown, with yellow and blue trim. There is an enclosed porch along the entire front of the house, with bushes and flowers planted along the front. There is always a flag for the season hanging from the flag post beside the front door. When you enter the house you walk into the hallway and as my friends often say you immediately feel at home.

My mom is the pack rat type, so there is stuff EVERYWHERE! Numerous family photos are on shelves in the living room and along the wall along the stairs. My dad redid one of the walls in the living room and turned it into one big wooden bookshelf. The shelves are covered with books and miscellaneous keepsakes and knickknacks. There is also a cabinet in the living room that is filled with all sorts of decorative salt and pepper shakers my mom has collected over the years. Everywhere you look in the house there is just memories of things, whether it be things my siblings and I made in school, or keepsakes from relatives’ homes that have passed that were given to us.

The dining room has various pieces of antique furniture in it. There is one of the old style wooden changing tables, which has now become my mother’s plant shelf when she has to take them in from the porch in the winter. There is a breakfast bar that has now become storage for photo albums and other keepsakes. There is also an old piano; although it is never played it has remained in the same spot for as long as we have lived there.

The kitchen is pretty much a regular kitchen except there is a table in the middle. Although we have a dining room, our nightly family dinners still all took place at that table. There were numerous stories told over dinner at that table. Whenever I go home to visit, it just doesn’t feel like a complete visit until we all sit down and have dinner there. It is rare that my brother, sister and I are all there at the same time, but when it does happen it feels great to be with the entire family in the house.

The basement is unfinished, the walls and floor are concrete. There is just the washing machine, my dad’s office and tool bench, and a room that is used for storing all the camping gear. There is a door in the basement that leads out to the backyard, which is HUGE. There is a clothes line, playhouse, grape arbor, volleyball field, and various trees my dad has planted.

There is a lot of history in this house, and as they say if the walls could talk, there are so many stories that could be told. My dad has begun redoing rooms one by one, so the house is starting to look more modernized, but it will always be the place I will call home, no matter where my “home” might actually be at that time.