Rant #3,926: My House

Today is kind of a weird anniversary for myself and my family.

It is the one-year anniversary of us living in our current residence, and it is about two-and-a-half years or so since we moved from our house to the apartment complex we are in now.

I can focus on both anniversaries here right now, but using general observations.

When my family and I moved to our house on Long Island in late summer 1971, it meant a great change for the four of us, since we all were born, lived in and grew up in New York City.

When we moved out to Long Island in late July 1971, it was a real and true mind shift for us.

My parents finally had the home they wanted, in a safe environment, unlike where we came from, which was in such disarray that it prompted this move.

For my sister and I, it was a new beginning, one that was fraught with many potholes, in particular for me, because we moved just before I was starting high school, a time in one's life that is full of so many changes to begin with that any additional upheavals can be striking, and it certainly was for me.

Flash ahead more than 50 years, and I still lived in that house, this time with my wife and son, with my parents living in the same house.

When my parents passed away, my family and I were in for new changes and a new reality, that being that we had to leave our home, and leave it as quickly as possible.

My health problems started right then and there, but we found a nice, new neighborhood to live in, and we moved into our first apartment here a few weeks after my mother died, with me hobbling and really, there was nowhere else for us to go.

Then exactly a year ago today, we relocated within the same development to a much larger apartment, and while I wasn't hobbling anymore, I certainly did not know what the future would bring, and that hobbling led to more maladies that I can't comprehend.

Anyway, let me say right away that there is nothing like a house.

Moving from an apartment to a house is a daunting task, but it is doable.

Moving from a house into an apartment is more involved, more intense, and much more involved--

Especially when I, myself, lived in that house for the better part of 50 years.

We were darn lucky. 

We found a development not too far away from where we lived, but in another town and another county, which has posed its own problems.

I can still frequent places that I used to when we lived in the old neighborhood, and I still feel like I still live in that old neighborhood.

But it simply isn't the same as living in a house ...

I have grown to enjoy where we live, enjoy our apartment, enjoy our terrace, and enjoy being where we are now.

I still wish that things could have turned out differently, that we still could be in that house, but I guess it simply wasn't meant to be.

I have been near the old house, but I have never purposely driven by it.

It is not ours anymore, and I have no interest in seeing what it looks like now.

I am firmly ensconced where I am, so why look at something that isn't ours anymore?

It makes no sense, to me at least, so while I have had opportunities to do so--we are only about 3.5 miles away from where we were--what would be the point?

As Dorothy said in "The Wizard of Oz," "there's no place like home," and that is just so true.

And home is not in a house anymore, it is in an apartment, and that is my home now.

Thinking back to when I was a kid in Rochdale Village, when we would invite someone over to our apartment, we would say variations of "come to my house," or "let's go to my house," or something like that, even though the word "house" was used in place of "apartment."

I never remember uttering the word "apartment" in such instances, and all these years later, even though my "house" is my "apartment," things haven't changed that much.

My house, my apartment, is my home, and that is the way it is, and the way it will always be.