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My Home - December 18, 2024

In March of 1999 my parents brought me home from the hospital to a little blue house with a brown door and a big glass window that looked out over the porch. There were adirondack chairs and a little table where my dad did his quiet time, and on a clear day you could see the ocean. Stepping through the front door, you could look down the hallway and see all the way through to the backyard. There were three bedrooms in the back, my room was on the left - a little Noah’s Ark themed room, bright blue paint and pairs of animals lined the walls. There were fake shutters on the outside of the living room, where I pretended I knew how to play the piano. There was also a flag pole hanging out front on which the flags rotated with the seasons - hearts for Valentine’s day, a leprechaun for St. Patrick’s day, a Turkey for Thanksgiving and so on and so on. The floors were original hardwood and creaked with each step to remind us of its age. The guest bathroom, which was painted the same color as the house and my bedroom, had a claw foot bath tub that made me feel like royalty. The kitchen had basically one counter so we brought in a hodgepodge of makeshift counters that my mom would sit me upon while she baked or cooked and I stole cookie dough from the bowl. There was dog hair everywhere - a fact that remained constant throughout our changing home as labs and goldens and even a St. Bernard and pug raced through the house. The rooms in that house had an abundance of colors - one was purple and then pink, another was pink and then purple, maybe they were both pink and purple at one point. One room was green and another white and every color of the rainbow had some place in that blue home. 

We painted the house yellow in 2004, I was much too young to remember this change from blue to yellow. When I gained consciousness at about age six, it seemed to me that our house had always been yellow. Yellow was a great color. Yellow was bright. No one else had a yellow house. It was a soft creamy yellow that felt light and airy and inviting. The inside of the house remained relatively unchanged. We got these horrible couches with bright red roses embroidered onto them, but they were the comfiest things you could imagine and they molded to our bodies. Our Christmas tree had its place in the front window and our decorations had their assigned spots as well. Books accumulated on the book shelves, and my sister and I went from bunked beds to un-bunked beds to bunked beds again back to un-bunked beds and we had these black comforters with highlighter color polka dots on them - we were creative, incohesive, and constantly changing little beings. Our parents moved their bedroom from the big green room that opened directly to the backyard to the smaller purple room next door. The green room became the TV room and my sister and I sat in front of the old TV that took VHS tapes and watched reruns of Tom and Jerry and Leave it to Beaver while we shoved goldfish into our mouths from small plastic bowls that had Disney characters printed all over them. At some point, we got a pool. Most little girls would be so excited about the prospect of a pool, but I was not like most little girls, I was sort of a bitch and overwhelmingly whiny and I didn’t want a pool. I wanted the grass where I played teacher and princess and forced my sister to be my servant and my student and every other role little sisters hate to play but do anyways just so they can be involved. The pool ended up being great. I felt pretty cool that I had a pool and pretty quickly forgot that I hadn’t ever wanted one in the first place. Funny how quickly kids change their minds and forget their qualms. 

my rendition of our yellow house

In 2010, my parents decided to redo our little house that was disjointed and broken up weirdly by walls. They kept saying to their friends, “We’re going to gut it.” I didn’t really want to “gut” our house, that sounded gross and unpleasant, but I liked the idea of having my own room and a big kitchen to cook in. My parents involved my sister and I in every step of the process that we could be a part of. We knocked down walls with sledgehammers and picked out paint for our bedroom - I chose lime green, which in hindsight might not have been a great idea to let an 11 year old choose paint colors (although my 8 year old sister really chose well). We looked over architecture plans and went on trips to the random cities with forgettable names to look at hardwood flooring and countertop samples. But when our little yellow house was finished being “gutted” and rebuilt, I found out we were painting the house green… GREEN! I sobbed. I wept. I ran away (aka I ran down the driveway and hid behind my mom’s car and watched my tears fall onto the pavement). This was a lovely green, really, much better than the horrendous lime green I chose for my own room, but I did not listen to any voice of reason, I was devastated. Reflecting on that meltdown - and it truly was a meltdown - I cannot really tell you why I was so heartbroken over the house being painted green. Perhaps I already felt such a massive loss from the inside of my house being completely changed, that I just wanted something to look the same. Even the planters were different and the location of our front door changed. I found solace in the chimney remaining in the same place, but mentally, for about four years, my house was yellow. Our little laundry space was yellow, though. I like to think that my mom and dad did that as a gift to me - a little piece of yellow in our entirely new home. 

Despite moving up to Santa Barbara for college and staying in the city post grad, I still consider my Altadena home to be home. I lived there for most of my life with a few breaks for some months abroad in France and subsequent rehab and my years at college. I returned to that home almost monthly during my freshman year of college, and almost as frequently throughout the rest of my time at Westmont. The drive from Santa Barbara to my home is permanently programmed into my mind - I know the exit and the turns and I could make that drive with my eyes closed. I made it hundreds of times during school - for small things like doctor appointments or when I needed to cry because the boy I liked didn’t like me back, and big things like surprising my parents for their birthdays or one of my dad’s school events or because I got diagnosed with bipolar and didn’t really know who or what I was anymore. I hopped in my car and pulled up to our home and opened the door and the world felt a bit better. 

There is always something happening in that house, a byproduct of my parent’s large community and open door policy. It is where friends come over in the morning for breakfast and end up staying until the next morning just because and it is where we host people from out of town before taking them on the trek down to LAX. My friends stay there even if I’m not home and my parent’s friends pop in frequently for swims on hot afternoons. There have been many breakfasts around the table with my mom’s women’s group – she brewed coffee for everyone even though she didn’t drink it herself. There are celebrations and birthday songs sung and graduations and Christmases with multiple families all brought together for the sake of being together. The most happening thing in that house though, are sports. It is ritualistic the way my mom, dad, and sister gather around the television for Sunday night football or NBA games. Channels are changed on commercial breaks to keep an eye on the other teams playing, and woots and sighs and hoots and groans can be heard down the block. I observe, never partake. I do not have an inherent love of sports the way my family does - it is in their blood - and the celebrations are just a part of my family’s language. But it makes the home vibrant and gives it character. I will, however, gladly watch the San Antonio Spurs play any day, though, but that’s a story for another day. 

There are lots of quiet moments as well. Early mornings as my dad crept out of my parent’s bedroom and got ready for work, writing us each notes left on the counter. There are the weekend mornings spent out on the back patio, watching the sun paint itself across the sky. There is the pause for prayer before meals and the minutes before everyone fell asleep, bedside lamps clicked off and a rustle of blankets in each individual room. The quiet feels just as comfortable and homey as the loud hustle and bustle. It is the safe part of the comfortability of home. Silence is not a skill my family has naturally, but those moments of silence feel precious and treasured and intentional. I feel right at home in them too. 

dad + our little blue home c. 1999

I could write about my home for pages - I could probably write a book on the subject of home (many people have, and I love that genre). I especially love my home because it expands beyond the four walls into my neighborhood - Nana, Mr. Dan, Dave and Sue, Callie and Connor, Rosie and Roland, Chloe and her mom, Camille and her dad, the people whose names I didn’t know but said hi to on the street anyway. My home is Cafe de Leche down the street that I can easily walk to but not as easily walk home from (Lake St hill is humbling). It is the Rite Aid on Altadena Dr where my sister and I got Thrifty Ice Cream growing up and the Bunny Museum on the corner that I was always too scared to actually go visit, but stared at intensely every time I drove by. Home is the fact that I can close my eyes and recount every street between my house and my elementary/middle/high school and the businesses along the route. My home is the place that I miss and that I crave whenever I am not there. My home is everything around 461 Athens and its heart is at 461 Athens itself. And I love that home that was once blue and then yellow and then green and looks nothing like it looked the day I arrived there in March of 1999 but has the same people and pictures and china teacups inside of it. It is where I was brought home to and where I will return to as long as I am able, because it is always home. 

–

January 8, 2025

But now that home is not there anymore. 

Last night a fire burned down my childhood home at 461 Athens St. It took the roof and the walls and the floorboards and the new deck my parents just finished building. It took the 2004 Toyota Matrix parked out front (that car needed to go anyway, although I loved it dearly). It took my sister’s KPOP posters and her cheetah print jacket that she never wore but kept because it looked cool and it took her stuffies, Sad and Mad. It took her records that she collected despite the lack of a record player. It took my new Birkenstock Boston’s and my carefully annotated books. It took my high school yearbooks and the prom dress I sewed with my grandma. It took my mom’s new Our Place pans and toast/air fryer oven that she was so beyond excited about. It took my parent’s wedding album and my baby book and my sister’s baby book. It took our childhood photos and my grandmother’s china. It took stacks of letters from 30 years of marriage full of birthday wishes and anniversaries and just becauses and love. It took the tattered photo booth photo strip of my dad and I at an arcade probably 15 years ago, making silly faces with a jawbreaker shoved into my cheeks. It took our ornaments and velvet stockings with “Noel” carefully embroidered into the top. It took the dining room table where we played card games and kindly bullied each other. It took tea towels collected from world travels. It took the children’s books that we’d collected from our childhood, that I hoped to one day read to my children and it took my dad’s box set of The Chronicles of Narnia from 1970 that he read to me as I laid sick on the couch from colonoscopy prep. It took recipes, thousands of recipes, that made up generations of meals shared. It took the whiteboard where my dad left notes for us as he left for work early in the morning and it took our collection of DVDs which now felt ancient and vintage. It took my mother’s entire wardrobe and the new pants she just bought that were so dang cute. It took my dad’s collection of orange shirts and my sister’s collection of hats. It took things that we cannot even remember but that during spring cleaning, we would find and get excited by; and all of that stuff inside of it is, in the end, just stuff, but each of those little things had meaning. And ultimately, it took the home I grew up in, that my parents raised us in, that my sister and I fought and reconciled in, that all of the dogs in my life ran around in. It took the home that I drove to when life felt too big and overwhelming and heavy and I needed to be somewhere safe and comfortable and warm. It took the location of so many memories and transformative experiences. 

There were some things that it did not take, like the people at the center of all of those memories. It did not take our ability to recollect these memories and it did not take our ability to create new ones. It did not take our laughter or humor and there is a shocking amount to chuckle about in the wake of the grief of losing our home in a fire. It did not take our ability to cry together, an experience that is inherently connective. It did not take my mom’s kindness or generosity, it expanded it. It did not take my dad’s empathy or tenderness, it swelled it. It did not take my sister’s passion or love, it deepened it. And it did not take away my deep appreciation for community, it highlighted it. 

And while we are devastated and in shock and will cycle viciously in and out of the stages of grief like a wind turbine, we still move forward – allowing space for steps backwards and breaks and a slower pace within each moment. I think back to all of the times in my life that I have grieved – death, destruction, for my body, for relationships, for the end of things and the change of them. While the intensity of the grief softens over time, the poignancy of the times gone by is still there; while the heaviness of the grief lightens, the grief itself never dissipates. 

This loss feels especially intense - when we lose something, evidently all that we want is for it to be back and that is the one thing that we cannot have. When people ask me if I need anything, I want to cry and say I need my house back. I need my little neighborhood and community and photos of my parents so that I can hang them up in my own home one day. But I do not have that and I cannot have that and I will not have that and so there is grief in that reality as well. It forces me to capture hundreds of pictures of my parents as they are now. My already sentimental personality becomes somewhat obsessive about making memories and keeping things that remind me of those memories. But in the grief, there is also apathy. I look at the things that are left in my life with more scrutiny - does this actually mean something to me? I get rid of clothes and books and random crap that is collecting dust on my shelf with such force and vigor and anger that one would think I hate the idea of stuff. In reality, in the face of future tragedy, I do not want to have more things to miss and mourn. I want minimal possessions and things so that I can grab all of them and save every little thing I care about. But wrapping up an entire lifetime into a tote bag is not realistic and in order to make it through each day of this life you must care about things and people and places. So instead I try to just savor things a bit more, snap more photos on my phone (and back them up to iCloud… however that works), and learn to tell stories with more color and so much excitement and emotion that it seems to come alive in front of you. Fire cannot take that away.

How to move forward? It is a question we are both asked and ask ourselves. Day by day, you know? I try not to let the future swell in front of me and become consumed by what this loss will mean for the rest of my life. My mind swarms with the ways that my future, my parent’s future, my sister’s future, and my future children’s future will be shifted. When I tell my children stories of my childhood and have few photos to show them, I will remember the fire that took them. When I sit with my children and read them bedtime stories, I’ll think of all of the books that my parents read to me that are now gone like Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Goodnight Moon. As I move into a new home and new city and hang pictures on my walls, I will remember my parent’s wedding photos in our hallway and our family photos on the mantle. Even now as I dry dishes, I think about the tea towels that we had accumulated from travels around the world. These moments give me pause. I try not to let them consume me but sometimes the heaviness of grief must just be allowed to exist and to be heavy. I do not know how to move forward, but I also know that we will not be stuck here forever. The nature of my family is that we do not remain stuck. We do not move on in that we forget and just push forward and trudge on like optimistic, emotionally disconnected, soldiers. But we do continue to take steps forwards and backwards, allow space for grief, and love each other and those around us well. We get a choice in that, and every single time I will choose to be sad when I must be and angry when I must and I will live in the realm of denial for as long as I can, because ignorance really is bliss. I will choose to cry and to laugh and to joke about the hilarity of it all. I will pray for what I can, and sometimes that means no prayer at all. I will think of my home often and with fondness and I will feel a deep and profound gratitude for the community that existed because of and within it. I will choose the joy and I will choose the grief and I recognize that those two things coexist quite frequently - an utterly perfect and confusing juxtaposition of emotions. Ultimately, I will choose to experience the full breadth of it all, and in that choice are all of the surprises of this little life.

the caragher fam <3