Home Sweet Home

Growing up, I told my parents they couldn't move until I was in college. Breezy Pt. Rd. was such a familiar and happy place for me that I didn't want to leave it. While most couples usually downsize when they become empty nesters, mine upgraded to, I have to say, a much cooler house than what I grew up in. Go figure. I still drive by my old house on occasion, where the tulips my mom planted are no more, and where there has consistently been a "For Rent" sign in the yard. The neighbors bought the house as a rental--probably until they decide to tear it down. Where's the love? Where's the nice young family creating memories there? Where's the dad and daughter playing catch in the driveway? And the dog pushing rocks around with her nose? Where are the kids hiding in the laundry shoot in a game of hide-and-go seek? And sleeping up in the loft on Christmas Eve? Where's the girl practicing dance routines in her reflection in the big picture windows in the living room? Just like my family used to do. I drove by on Christmas Eve once a few years ago, and there wasn't even a big Christmas tree in the window! Maybe there were Jewish renters living there...not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying the house looked unloved.

About the same time my parents moved, I found a new house of my own in Iowa City...the Alpha Chi Omega house. I only lived there for two years of college, but created about as many memories there as I did in 19 years of living in the house I grew up in.

I moved into this sorority house with 45 "sisters", which was quite a change from the seven years previous of living with just my parents. One semester, I lived in a room with 8 girls. Seriously. We had one sleeping room filled with bunkbeds that we slept in every night. Someone was always snoring, or talking in their sleep, or falling off the bunkbed...okay, that last one was me. We had so much fun in those two years, that my friends and I filled up three entire poster boards filled with funny quotes of things that happened. We played practical jokes, combated bats in the house, scared off crazies who tried to sneak in and steal our underwear, got ready for dates and formals together, ate dinner every night with our house mom, gathered in the lounge to watch 90210 and Dawson's Creek, had post dinner dancing jams in our rooms, hug time on the couch, and sunbathed on the tiered deck. We had our chapter meetings in the basement, and fraternities came to serenade us in the foyer. There was always someone to chat with coming home from class and laughter was nonstop.

My sorority sisters and I always enjoy going back to the house when we're back in Iowa City. Memories come flooding back as soon as we step in front of the three-story tudor house on Washington St. Sadly, a tornado ripped through Iowa City last weekend and seemed to touch down right on my sorority house. Word is that the damage is so severe, it is beyond repairing what is remaining.

What is to become of my childhood house, I don't know. But I don't get the feeling that family fun, as I knew it, is being carried out there. And while I know another sorority house will be found and the girls will create memories in a new spot, I am most sad that my legacies can't continue to carry out the same girlish goofiness within the same walls that I did. It's not the physical structure of these houses that I miss, but that fact that I can't go back, revisit them and take comfort in the fact that new people will be loving them and creating memories in them for years and years to come.