Letting Go of the House That Built Me

Each of us has a plot of land upon which there is an unseen spot, an invisible 'X' that marks the spot of our origin.

My father's was the first I saw erased into oblivion.

The lot stands naked now, stripped of everything familiar. Where his childhood home once breathed and lived, there's nothing but raw earth, a few scattered stones, and the ghost of a foundation outline barely visible beneath early morning mist. Red clay soil—the same soil that held my father's childhood home and that held my own—looks different somehow. Exposed. Vulnerable.

Demolition isn't clean. It's violent, even when carefully executed. The bulldozers left ragged edges where precision once stood, like a surgeon's rough first cut. I can still trace the phantom lines of where the front porch began, where my grandpa's bedroom window once framed summer evenings and winter snowfalls. The precise spot where my grandfather would sit and spit his Bloodhound plug tobacco off the back porch next to the particular new dog he had in keeping is now just another indentation in unforgiving ground.

Bloodhound was a "doggone good chew."

There's a particular sound to demolished memory—not silence, but something more complex. A whisper of what was, punctuated by the occasional forgotten nail shifting in disturbed earth, the soft settling of memories becoming geological. Some losses aren't just emotional. They're topographical. They reshape not just landscape, but the very terrain of who we understand ourselves to be. You could still see it decades later in a topographical map in your mind's eye, should you choose to.

Some losses are geological—they shift the ground of who we are.

I found myself wandering down Blackjack Road circa 1998. I was on a separation from my first wife, and I think I just wanted something at the time to connect to. That day I drove back to the old Jones family area I remembered, thinking that just looking at the old house I knew and that my father had came from would root me again in reality somehow.

My Grandpa Jones never worked a nine-to-five in his life. He was a carpenter, blacksmith, and farmer. He built every house on that road as it existed in my childhood. I saw many of them, but something was off.

His house was gone.

The scene before me was the beginning of a driveway I remembered, but tall grass and some errant daffodils, a fleeting reminder of my grandmother's hand that had somehow survived for over two decades. Parking and walking up to where the house once stood, all that remained was a half-buried concrete slab that marked a corner of the house.

He had taught my father how to lay brick here. My father, in turn, taught me masonry using the same methods. I only had the stories I had witnessed in real-time: the way Grandpa would make kitchen knives for the locals, the outhouse that once stood on the hill behind the house with its Sears catalog for toilet paper, and the lingerie edition that never seemed to disappear.

As a child in the early 70s, I was there when they traded their ice-box for a first electric refrigerator. Back then, you would get the block of ice from nearby Buford. Mama Jones would use a stove that required a fire in the firebox, exchanged for an electric range.

The couple that had emerged from the Great Depression by surviving on peanuts that they grew had arrived in the Modern Age.

When I told my Dad the house was gone, I saw the flash on his face. He appeared to deflect its importance because there are things in life you can't change. But I could feel something was lost in him because I felt something similar.

I had no idea that my time was coming.

A friend of mine was discussing hometowns, and it came around to me sharing about my own. I had pulled up Google Earth to show him an actual view of the shopping center I first worked in and the building that housed the Winn-Dixie that I mentioned when a co-worker lost a shopping cart into the plate glass windows of a bank.

It was gone. I blinked. Was I confused? I surveyed the map again. No, I had the right place. It had been razed, along with a smaller strip mall, the bank, and all of the buildings in that area, and replaced with an entire apartment complex.

No matter, I thought, I'll show him the home I grew up in. In the place of the house I had known was a structure in process. The entire lot had been leveled and reborn. Everything I knew, all of the work projects I had helped my Dad with, the porch and walkway I'd split my lip on for my 3rd birthday, the hill I would slide down in the winter and fight mowing the lawn in the summer.

All of it was erased.

I was left with the fact that all I had was a scar on my lip and all the memories my brain could hold. As my father used to say in his last days, "Don't get attached, because everything will burn. It will all go away, even you, someday."

Your home could be a pivot point, a speck that denotes your origin. But like losing your parents, you find yourself alone, no longer with anything behind you but shadows of the past to look back on, and all you can do is move forward.

In the intricate landscape of human experience, home transcends mere physical geography. It is a living, breathing construct that exists simultaneously in space and memory, in concrete walls and the abstract terrain of identity. We are not simply inhabitants of spaces but co-creators of meaning, continuously negotiating our sense of self through the environments we occupy and those we are compelled to leave behind.

Physical spaces are more than architectural configurations—they are silent narrators of our personal histories. Each room holds whispers of conversations; each threshold marks transitions of lived experience. We build homes with brick and mortar and wood but equally with emotions, rituals, and intimate connections. Like my grandfather had pride in building the houses on Blackjack Road, these spaces sculpt our internal landscapes, imprinting themselves upon our psychological architecture. The sound of a floorboard, the odd rays of morning light, and the ghostly sounds of a now-vanished neighborhood become fundamental threads in our own stories.

Geographical anchoring speaks to a profound human need: the desire to root ourselves, to establish a sense of belonging that provides psychological stability. Yet displacement reveals the remarkable plasticity of human resilience. When external circumstances fracture our physical domains, we discover an extraordinary capacity to carry our essential selves across borders, cultures, and traumatic transitions.

Memory emerges as our most portable inheritance. It is a sanctuary immune to physical demolition, a repository of experience that cannot be evicted or dismantled. Our memories are not static archives but dynamic ecosystems, constantly reinterpreted and re-imagined. They transform loss into continuity and fragmentation into narrative.

We build homes. Homes build us.

Our spaces are not merely containers but active participants in how we're built. They see our vulnerabilities, celebrate our transformations, and preserve the intricate topography of our inner worlds. We really are, as they say here in the South, "a product of our raisin'."

Demolition may destroy a physical house, but never the home we hold inside us. The human spirit has a magical talent to find belonging for us, create meaning, and transform displacement into a form of profound self-discovery.

In the grand tapestry of human experience, our true foundations are not constructed of stone or steel but woven from the delicate threads of memory, emotion, and shared human vulnerability. We are not defined by the physical spaces we inhabit but by the internal landscapes we carry—vast, intricate territories that defy geographical boundaries and temporal constraints.

Loss, in its most profound sense, is not about destroying physical structures but about transforming our internal geographies. Each displacement becomes a moment of profound potential—an opportunity to redefine ourselves to understand the remarkable plasticity of human identity. We learn that belonging is not a fixed point but a dynamic process of continuous becoming.

Our memories are our most sacred inheritance. They are not mere recordings of past experiences but living, breathing ecosystems of meaning. They transform pain into poetry, fragmentation into narrative. In the face of physical destruction, our memories stand as resilient monuments—portable, adaptable, and infinitely renewable.

The human spirit reveals its most extraordinary characteristic in moments of transition. We aren't victims of circumstance but dusty street preachers of experience, turning loss into understanding and displacement into growth. The lay of the land expands with each new challenge, each uprooting, each re-imagining of self.

This isn't a narrative of mere survival at the end of the day but an understanding of transformation. We honor the complexity of human experience—its fragility and incredible strength. We recognize that identity is not a static construct but a continuous dialogue between inner and outer worlds, between memory and possibility.

Some foundations can't be measured in concrete—they're measured in heartbeats.