I lived in a yellow house until the year I turned five. While there is nothing prominently significant about this particular yellow house other than the fact I resided there for five years of my life, and although I do not consider the majority of my true growing up to have happened there, one cannot ignore the technical truth that it happened. Even though the house itself would not have appeared notable to anyone else but my family and I, it was special to us, and that is what mattered.
In my mind as a child, I always thought that yellow house to be very grand and of at least considerable size. Only during later visits as a teenager was I confronted with the disillusion that it was not quite as spacious as I had remembered, and, to my chagrin, almost dull. During my time there as a child, however, it was my mansion; my house, my home, where I crawled down the stairs and jumped on the beds and marveled at the fact that there were always more rooms. The room my sister and I shared was, even to an outside, a happy place. My father had painted flowers, clouds, and grass on the walls, and even a hot air balloon featuring my sister and I within it on one of the walls. Our family was not one for technology back then, so my sister and I often played make-believe in our shared room, pretending we were nature explorers, Pokémon trainers, or fairies. We often went into the sunroom in our house and attempted to paint works of art, but we, equally as often, failed. One day, when my sister and I decided that painting in the house was too boring, we decided to paint outside. After a few minutes, my sister, with the blue paint, threw a fit because she disliked how her painting was coming out, and began to paint my body blue. It was a humorous happenstance and as soon as my mother came outside, she ran back inside only to return with the camera. To this day we have photographic evidence of this amusing event.
The home-schooling of my siblings and I meant more time at home, more adventures, and more normalcy, for that was really all we knew. There was a gazebo in the middle of the backyard, and when we were small and young, my mother, siblings, and I slept in the gazebo on a hammock during the summer days. The yard and forest behind our house was space enough for me, and leaving the house for even a little while saddened me. The only place I enjoyed as much as my home was the library, where the book collection surpassed even the one in my father’s office, a place I was seldom allowed to enter. The door to his study was a location of frequent visitation for me because I enjoyed sitting in front of his door while waiting for lunchtime, the time where he would take a break from grading papers and the time I could peek into his office at the believed-to-be countless book shelves within.
The living room in that yellow house was where my family and I were a family. We stayed up most nights to watch Nickelodeon cartoons and Friends, I had my first Christmases there, and we often ate lunch in the middle of the floor, talking about anything that came to mind. In the middle of the room was a grey couch. On the exterior, this particular couch appeared very ugly and mediocre, but it actually was filled with many memories. Every Saturday morning at nine o’clock, my sister and I awoke to watch Pokémon from this couch. I had held my baby brother for the first time sitting on this couch. My sister had held me for the first time on this couch. It was a sentimental piece of furniture. Later, preceding the move to the house I live in now, we gave away the grey couch. It was a bittersweet goodbye, as the memories would always be sewn into the seams, but the couch itself remained an unwanted, uncomfortable aberration compared to the rest of our colorful and warm furniture.
Outside in the yard we had a small garden that was full of all types of fruit. We had many blueberry bushes, red and black raspberry bushes, strawberries, and even a patch of rhubarb. I remember clearly one day I was walking through the patch of rhubarb and I cut my finger on one of the rhubarb plants. It astounded me because I did not know that rhubarb cuts even existed, nor that they felt like a paper cut. I recounted this event to my mother after it had happened and she did not believe me, thinking it had not actually been the plant that had cut me but instead a bug or a rock. From that day forward rhubarb pie reminded me of that injury, even if the rhubarb hadn’t truly caused it.
My old yellow house is not yellow anymore. Instead, the family who lives there now painted it a shade of white. We rarely drive by the house now, but every time we do, it gets smaller, seems more decrepit, and less warm. However, in my mind, I will always remember it as being yellow, being my house, and being my place of comfort and warmness.