My family home was always a work in progress. When we bought it from an elderly woman in 2008, it was a time capsule of 1970s Texas home interiors, dominated by carpets and elaborate patterns of wallpaper. 

It took about six months from the time we bought the house to the time we moved in. This season was characterized by paint-and-pizza parties, wallpaper and carpet stripping redefined as family activities, and my dad taking a month off work to refinish the hardwood floors downstairs himself. When we moved in, my room was neon green, the floors upstairs were carpet-free but stained in spirals by decades of glue, and none of our kitchen cabinets had doors.

Moving from our “old house” was strange, though we relocated to less than a mile away. My middle sister and I no longer shared a room, and we painted over the walls in the nursery that we had painted with flowers and butterflies to welcome my baby sister. I can still picture this house, but only with difficulty, and only in bespoke moments: my mom trimming my bangs in the bathroom; digging a huge hole in the middle of the backyard after my dad’s friend recounted elaborate tales of his underground childhood cavern; eating breakfast and watching cartoons from the living room floor on our last Saturday in the house, when we’d already moved most of our furniture. The sadness of moving dissipated in light of the novelty of a new place, but a tenderness remains. We once drove past the old house years after moving, and my dad, ever the avid gardener, exclaimed, “What are they doing to the rose bushes?!” 

While the old house lives on in nostalgic childhood memories, it is the “new house”—a title that persisted for fifteen years—that I truly imagine as our family home. Upon moving in, we asserted ourselves in this new space, cluttering every surface. The built-in shelves overflowed with books, necessitating creative storage solutions including book-as-structural-support to the couch with a broken beam from my sister jumping on it. My dad got to work in the garden, planting roses that he had grafted from the bushes at the old house.

I imagine a sort of mutual warming-up period for ourselves and for the house, suddenly much busier than it had been in decades. Perhaps we were overwhelming at first, too messy and too loud. We cracked walls, scratched floors, and loosened the stairway bannister. Before starting high school, I painted my walls a lighter shade of green and put up curtains in place of the temporary paper blinds that had been hanging since we moved in five years prior. Our project-making stretched seemingly ever on, and we did our best to repair that which we had broken, all amidst the busyness of daily life. We could make and remake ourselves within this place

I wonder when our home felt its most full, its most content. As years passed, we grew up, and our lives became fuller. The house was certainly well-animated during my high school days, hosting sleepovers and cross-country team dinners and parties. With its place on the corner, lack of downstairs curtains (paper or otherwise), and its inhabitants often up late, my best friend’s family referred to our house as “the lighthouse”—our neighbors could see right into our late-night dinners and homework sessions. Yet when I try to look back at this time so full of activity, I feel that I was so busy that I can barely remember it. I forgot about our collective project, losing sight of our home in all of my occupation.

Thus, while these years may have been our home’s busiest, perhaps the greatest contentment came with reunions, when its core inhabitants returned. The seasons of life in our family home to which I look back with most fondness are indeed such returns. My most dramatic return took place during the first confinement of COVID-19, in the spring of 2020. After a semester of exchange in Grenoble, I had come back to Grand Rapids in the mid-winter excited to live with my friends for the first time off-campus. While this transition had its own difficulties, I was upset when my parents insisted I come back to Texas. The choice was ultimately up to me, and though I was chock-full of fear-of-missing-out as my friends decided to isolate together, I nonetheless chose to go back to Abilene.

What followed was a season of sanctuary. In a time that was so scary and unimaginable, and my brain full of anxieties that I did not then understand, my family home warmly welcomed back its prodigal daughter. I had dismissed my home for so long, reducing Abilene and Texas to their worst parts and ignoring their goodness—or perhaps being too busy to notice it. That spring for me was one of stillness and rediscovery. I watched my dad’s roses bloom. I sat on the front porch with my mom during a thunderstorm. I shared a room with my little sister, who had been only twelve when I moved away, and got to join in the celebrations of her fifteenth birthday. We joined a Black Lives Matter march that I would never have previously imagined happening in Abilene. From the solace of our home, I got to reconfigure my relationship with my hometown and with my family. 

As everything must have its time, seasons of loneliness and of busyness cycle back around. Our dear house was sold several years ago as my parents moved to Nashville, and this move has brought with it a much deeper ache than that from our “old house”. We grew into ourselves together in this home—and I am so much further than a mile away. I no longer have a home in Texas. For that, I carry a grief, but one accompanied by the joy and comfort of our years in our family home and a lived understanding of the beauty of imperfection and constant creation.

Rylan Shewmaker

Rylan Shewmaker (‘21) calls herself a geographer, though none of her degrees substantiate this. After growing up in Texas and studying in Grand Rapids, she moved to Brussels, Belgium, for her master’s degree in urban studies. She still lives in Brussels and works for a housing non-profit. She enjoys audiobooks, bike commuting, sunny days, and learning new things.