by Jennifer Jacquet

Created on: January 22, 2009

We always call it "the old house", even though it is the newest house we have ever lived in. But it was the house where our family became what it is today.
When my parents were first married, they lived in an apartment in Baltimore. A rented house in Chester Harbor was my birthplace, while my brother, Adam, took his first steps in the house on Cannon Street. But Lauren was born just after we moved into the old house, and Megan came along two and a half years later. Then, a year or so after that, Aunt Sis moved in.

The old house was built on a whole acre, with a swing set and a vegetable garden in the back yard. We had apple trees, short and slim; they bore tiny, hard, bitter apples whose cores we used to throw into the neighbor's yard. We planted peach and pear trees, but they never bore anything, and whenever my grandfather came over with his riding mower, he ran over the baby willow tree. But it always came back.
On the other side of the house, opposite the apple trees, were my father's pines. Right in front of the house was another tree, one whose name I never knew, and behind the garden were two blueberry bushes.
The old house had a swimming pool too, and a back deck. The garage was where we did our messy projects, like building a puppet booth for VBS, or painting sets for the school play. On the other side of the back fence was a soybean field, and across the street was the "mountain", a pile of excess dirt from all of the new houses going up in the neighborhood. The mountain was our fortress, our wilderness, our Everest, our sledding hill, our hide-and-seek place, our haven, our everything . . . until it was carted away.
But our house was still a good house to grow up in. The kitchen was roomy, though not as spacious as my mother had always dreamed of. The kitchen table was where we did school for the first several years. We would crowd around with our books: first three of us, then four when Lauren was old enough to start doing real schoolwork, then five when our cousin Daniel joined us for a few years. By the time Megan began school, Daniel had graduated, and another cousin and my best friend, Chelsea, had begun homeschooling with us as well. And then we fixed up part of the basement to use as a schoolroom.
That is perhaps what I remember most about the old house: its flexibility. When we found out that Aunt Sis would be moving in, we added on the garage and the apartment above it. The basement began life as a laundry room and over-crowded storage space. It later contained my father's office, our schoolroom, and Adam's bedroom, as well as the laundry and a few assorted odds and ends that didn't fit anywhere else.
The bedrooms were never really "fixed", either. When our first exchange student came, I gave up my room and moved in with Lauren and Megan. The next year, I stayed put, and Adam moved in with the girls, his area discreetly sectioned off with an old bed sheet. Aunt Sis stayed in Adam's room when she first moved in, until she was able to move into her apartment. And of course, Daniel and Chelsea stayed over a lot, making good use of couches and floors. And although Adam had had the basement fixed up quite nicely, he never really lived there for more than a week or so at a time.
The overwhelming "theme" of the house, I suppose, was opportunity. It was never really everything that we needed it to be, never really as big or as neatly put away or as full of bedrooms and storage as we wanted, but we always felt that it could be. It always held that promise for us.

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