The home I grew up in

I grew up here.
This is the home where old famous people used to pay their visits. Henry Ford. Thomas Edison. Jack London. Luther Burbank.

It was built in 1850 by John Hendley who became a doctor in early Santa Rosa.

When I was nine years old and moved into this house, I automatically believed that the reason I lived in such an old estate was because I was going to be famous as well and people from all over the world would come to my childhood home and tour it.

It didn't hurt that my childhood home was decorated in antiques.
I ate my french toast here every morning. And I enjoyed hamburger helper casseroles for dinner nearly every night. And later, in the early 1990s, I learned to hang wallpaper in this room.

I think it was a year after we moved in, when an old lady and her son who was also very old, drove up our driveway one morning. They walked up to our door and in her thin, frail voice told us that she grew up in this house from 1898 - 1908 and before she died, her wish was to come back and visit her childhood home. And she did. She came from the state of Washington. She gave us a photo of the front of the home from 1906.

I remember her eyes danced as she walked through the different rooms remembering. In the library, she paused for a moment and said that she had signed her name from a diamond on one of the window panes as she stood out on the cellar door. She leaned and walked closer to the window and there it was. Her signature still remains there with the date 1908. Her eyes welled up in tears as she pressed her fingers against her childhood signature.

A few years later, another woman drove up the driveway and knocked on our door. She lived in our house in the 1930s. She told stories of her horse named Red who she kept down in the stables where our horses were then. The sign RED was still hanging up in the stable and we gave it to her.

We had horses, rabbits, ducks, geese, sheep, a goat and a pig and numerous dogs and cat at this house. We rode our honda 50 and honda 70 mini bikes around this property and it really was a wonderful home to grow up in.

I moved away when I was 19 but I actually returned and lived here five years ago for a couple of months in between selling my town house and moving into the home I live in now. I slept in the same twin bed I slept in as a child, though now in a different bedroom; the mattress so old that it was old when I slept in it as a child. My lower back hurt each morning from awakening. But, I am grateful for those few months living back with my mother and returning back to my roots.

Its an enchanted home.

My mother still lives here and we come here for dinners there at least every 10 days.

And one day, (regretfully) and hopefully, it will be a long, long time into the future, before the house will become empty and the lights will turn off for the last time, and I can tell you when that happens, I won't be able to bear to ever drive near this home again. My heart couldn't bare it. It is my home. My family. My life. Who I am and what I am is because of this house and what happened in these walls as a child. And someday when it becomes empty... my heart will break into a million pieces.

Welcome to my childhood home. If you come to visit me, I'll take you here. You'll love my mother and I promise you an experience you won't forget easily.

I just wish I had another 50 years to enjoy it. And maybe I will.

PS: My bedroom windows growing up was the two windows to the right of the house and the one window on the side of the house upstairs.