returning to your childhood home is an experience everyone should have

[PhillyB]

i grew up living all over the country, so i don't really have a true childhood home. between maryland, vermont, colorado, ohio, minnesota, new york, florida, west virginia, and north carolina it's hard to really pick a particular place that i consider to be the location that embodied my formative years. but two have always done it for me: kernersville, nc where i moved at age 16, and before that in upstate new york, syracuse area, where i lived in the mid 90s for a couple of years, at age 10, 11, and 12.

i kind of consider syracuse to be my childhood home. after 20 years away i decided i needed to go back and see it again. every once in a rare while my bar will shut down for several-day stretches if there's zero possibility of doing business, and that was the case this week. i got a call from my manager that i had the next couple of days off. my wife was going out of town with the kid anyway, so i woke up the next day, jumped in my car, and drove 11 hours north to syracuse.

nothing had changed in two decades. everything felt a little smaller, but that was it. it was an apartment complex we lived in, so i was able to walk around the complex without creeping anyone out. my apartment was still there. they playground in the back was there, where i got in my first fight when a teenager in rollerblades was beating my friend with a dog least and i broke a stick over his elbow. he kicked me in the ribs with his rollerblades and i realized then i wanted to start learning martial arts.

the apartments were fairly rural, and we were backed up to acres of woodlands. childhood neighborhood politics occurred in the playground and in the woods directly across the street from my front door, which were chock full of forts and shelters and crisscrossing trails that i knew by heart. twenty years later i found them instantly, like i'd never left. i knew where the dugout i built was, i knew where the tree fort was. that tree fort was the sight of constant age-related battles, between the kids my age and the teenagers who kept laying claim to it. we would crawl up there and painstakingly nail beams across the branches and haul wooden pallets up to wedge in place for the floor, and they would come in and tear it down in their 90s bowl cuts and saggy 90s pants.

it was still there.

 

 

this place backed up to a massive complex of concrete ruins. it took me twenty years to figure out that it was the remnants of old WWII-era industry, lots of armament manufacturing, evidently. as a kid i didn't know this, but we were all aware there were tons of weird bunker-looking things immediately surrounding the woods. they were always covered in 90s-style graffiti from the older kids, and a source of great mystery. past the low-lying swamp grounds in the ravine past the tree fort the land opened up a little bit, and if you walked far enough you'd come across the staggered, multi-story remnants of the bomb factory. everything was cracked and overgrown, roofs gone, just a bunch of concrete flooring, walls, and the occasional overhead. it was a general vibe of creepiness and awe back then, at age 10, when you'd come across fire pits with animal bones in them, graffiti, graffiti, graffiti EVERYWHERE, and smashed beer bottles and the occasional hypodermic needle. teenagers would drag dead squirrels back there and burn them in fires and have "seances" and then go home and leave the mess. one time a group of us was back there exploring and three teenagers with sticks jumped out and started chasing us. we freaked out and scattered, slogging through the swamp and across broken concrete tracking while they laughed behind us and told us they'd kill us if we ever came back. assholes.

 

syracuse always got monster lake effect snows in the winter, like the rest of upstate new york, and we had the advantage of having the best sledding slope of my life sitting thirty yards past my front porch. it doesn't look like much in the summer, standing up top, but in the winter that thing would get covered up and freeze over and the entire apartment complex would be out there sledding on it. i used to steal endust from the closet and spray the bottom of my sled with it and beat everyone's ass in races. the teenagers would roll massive snowballs out there, form them into gigantic ramps, and spray them with water at night so they'd freeze. i swear to god i came within an inch of breaking my neck and dying on more than one occasion when i'd hit one at 300mph on an overinflated tube and go flying off into the brambles at the bottom of the hill upside down.

 

 

my most vivid memories, i think, are of lake oberon. this is where i first fell in love with fishing. some old guy gave me his pole when i was gawking at him hauling in a largemouth bass. he snapped a lure onto the line and showed me how to cast it. i hooked a 2lb largemouth on my second cast and thought i was going to die from the adrenaline rush. it was the best experience of my life and i was instantly hooked. for the next couple of years i spent every damn day of my life strapping my shitty walmart fishing pole to my bike, riding with one hand and holding onto my makeshift tacklebox with the other, down the bike trails through the woods and across fields to the lake. i swear to god that place had the biggest bass i've ever seen in my life. they've recently replaced the pier with some soulless piece of reinforced plastic or something, but the old one was Y-shaped and had big cracks that you could see through.

three tiers for the fishermen: the shitty little sunfish at the shores that you could catch with just a hook because it was shiny, the crappie that would hang underneath the pier, and the largemouth bass. those other ones were for kids. i was there for the bass. i became quite an angler and i could usually pull in 2-3 a day shore and pier fishing, sometimes more than that. there was a snapping turtle that lived in the runoff area under the base of the pier, and all the teenagers told everyone it had snapped one kid's balls off one time so we were all scared of it, but the biggest legend of lake oberon was one-eyed willie, this giant motherfuging bass that looked like a fuging whale. it would appear occasionally from the depths to inhale a flopping sunfish that some kid had caught and left on the pier in the sun for too long before remembering to toss it back. i hooked that fat bitch all of one time. he came out of the murky depths covered in hooks the size of closet hangers and ripped the spinnerbait right off the end of my shitty 10lb line without even trying. another time a kid had him creeping after his new lure about to strike, and then jerked it out of the water because he was scared the fish would take his precious new lure. i almost pushed him in.

teenagers would throw bicycles off the end and try to hit fish with nickles. teenagers were dumb as fug in the 90s.

 

i was really sad when we moved away. this place is where i had a lot of my formative experiences in life, from my first fight to the time i first realized girls were legit attractive. there was this girl named ally and i became smitten out of damn nowhere. that was part of the reason i was so pissed when we moved. thanks dad, it was meant to be and you ruined it. it took me twenty years to go revisit it, see the place where me and my stupid friend found a lighter and tried to make a torch out of sticks and light it on fire, only to be yelled at by an observant neighbor and sent scrambling. some kid's dad was missing and hand from an accident, and he would show us all his stump and how he could play doom on the computer without it anyway. some kids would catch bullfrogs and use magnifying glasses to burn holes in their stomachs. fug those kids, i hated them. they were the older worthless 90s bowlcut teenagers. pogs were a thing back then too. my parents were too cheap to buy me pogs so i made my own and traded some for a slammer.

like most places, the memories attached to them are personal, so i'm not sure why i'm sharing all the photos. to the average viewer they are just any-old-place, some suburban wherever tucked in some other state. but man, these places mean everything to me. going back was one of my favorite things i've ever done. i was only there an hour before i jumped back in my car and drove back home, but i relived all my adventures, trekked back through my old trails, walked back to the lake, checked to see if the perennial hornet's nest i chucked a stick at was still there (it wasn't.) it was damn near therapeutic and it gave me a new excitement for my daughter's childhood. i can't wait for her to have those kinds of memories and it's inspired me to keep making sure i put her in a situation where she can.

if you haven't been back to your childhood home i really recommend you take a few days off and make it happen.

[pstall]

I was born in Dover DE and up until i was 24, had never seen my home for my first two years of life. I went there in thw mid 90's and it was just weird.  Part anticlimactic part oh this is where im from.  

I identify with South Carolina and don't regret my upbringing for a second. 

I was born in the first state to join the Union and grew up in the first one to leave it. My entire life i have been geographically bipola. 

[Jangler]

No.

[PandaPancake]

Mine is now a fire station. It's where I've lived the longest, seven years out of almost 33. Hell some of you might even be covered by it.

 

1528 Teague Ln

Kernersville NC, 27284

[Your Creeper Cabbie]

Been there.

[PhillyB]

I was born in Dover DE and up until i was 24, had never seen my home for my first two years of life. I went there in thw mid 90's and it was just weird.  Part anticlimactic part oh this is where im from.  

I identify with South Carolina and don't regret my upbringing for a second. 

I was born in the first state to join the Union and grew up in the first one to leave it. My entire life i have been geographically bipola. 

i think it's much different when you live someplace for formative years and then leave it and don't go back for a couple of decades. i spent my latter teenage years in kernersville, but i've been back countless times, so i think the memories get diluted a little with new ones.

baldwinsville was like digging up a time capsule.

[Doyle]

One of the houses I grew up in is now a bed and breakfast over in Asheville.  I've thought about going to revisit it but it would just seem weird for some reason.  

 

http://englishtudorhouse.com

 

 

[YourMomsLover]

I can relate Phil. This is the house I grew up in. Was my grandparents house. They raised me, so they were really more like my mom and dad. Lived here from 1987-2005.

 

 

This pic was taken after my mom and dads wedding. Had it in the backyard there. I'm actually in this picture. My mom was about 6 weeks pregnant with me. Lol

Countless memories made there. 

 

My grandpa passed away on September 2nd of last year, after a "successful" triple bypass surgery. Fell unconcious in the kitchen floor as he was leaning his head back to take his medication. My grandma couldn't get that picture out of her head of him as he was laid out in the floor, so she decided to sell the house. Still blames herself, because she couldn't get him rolled over. He was about 300 pounds, and he was wedged between the stove and the kitchen table.

 

Heres a pic of him and I on the day he came back home after the surgery. 2 weeks before he passed. 

The house was sold in January of this year. I would give anything to be able to go back there. 

I live in Cleveland now, but I plan on going back to Asheville soon, and the first thing I'm going to do is sit on the steps that lead up from the road to the sidewalk, and just sit. Reminisce. God I miss that place. It's only been 8 months since I walked out of that house, carrying the last box of my grandmas stuff out of there. She found a nice little house in Hendersonville. 

Hearing the door shut for the last time is something I'll never forget.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Hotsauce]

Withou reading any of your post, and just looking at the pictures, it looks like you lived under a bridge and showered in a lake! 

 

But yeah, I want to take my kids back to my hometown and walk them around the park I grew up at. 

[Zaximus]

It's like kids now don't get that excitement of building a treehouse that is super dangerous, you know the one around 3 trees in a triangle?  We had one like 4 stories high, as an adult thinking back, it was the most dangerous thing ever (we did put hand rails around it LOL).  

[RealBitsOfPanther]

I grew up in Richmond, VA. Lived there until I was 16. I have no desire to go back. NC is home to me.