When I was eight years old, my family traded houses with another family. The houses were maybe a 1/4 of a mile apart, so it was not a difficult move in those terms. However, it was this new house that I associate most of my childhood memories with. Of course, I remember our old house. I remember the winter when our refrigerator broke and my parents could not afford another one. I remember the window ledge where we stored all the perishable food items. They were behind a thick plastic covering were a window normally would be. I remember sharing a room with my sister, and my two brothers being right across the hall.

Our new house saw a lot more "life" than the previous one. It saw the death of my father; my mother's remarriage; the birth of two baby boys. It also saw six children enter the crazy stage called puberty and emerge without too much damage. Both my brother and myself were married in the church walking distance from this house. My best friend and I would tan on the roof above my room on the rare hot Alaskan summer days. We made forts in the attic crawl space, sneaking applesauce from the pantry because we had to climb up the shelves to enter our fort.

Basically, this was my house. My families house. I say "was" because about five months ago, my youngest brother graduated high school and shortly after that, moved out of the house. This left my parents in a huge house with no children. A couple years earlier, my step-fathers job had been transferred to a town about five hours away. He had made the sacrifice to commute back home for the weekends, but now with no children requesting not to leave the high school that his previous five siblings had graduated from, they decided to rent out our house and move to Homer.

Prior to the move my parents made some much needed repairs to the house. They tore out the old carpet and replaced some with wood floors and some with new carpet. They painted all the walls. They removed bookshelves screwed into the walls. They completely redid both bathrooms.

And then, about one month ago, my mother and step-father packed up the home we had lived in for 23 years.

I am slowly realizing that this transition is harder on me then I thought. I don't like talking to my mom on the phone and not being able to picture which room she is standing in based on sound alone. I don't like that another family is living in my house. I don't like that my childhood phone number, the ONLY one I remember, no longer reaches anybody I know.

I still have reasons to visit Eagle River. My brother and his family still live across the street from our old home. But the next time I visit my parents, it will be in a new town, in a new house, going to a new church. This will take some getting used to.