The House on Hazelwood
By: Lisa Allen
Tags: Kids, Growing Up, Generation Z, Parenting, Motherhood

The day I rode my bicycle from the top of Evergreen Drive, down my street, and slammed face first into my own mailbox was a bad one. At age 12, I was pretty awesome at riding my 3-speed marine blue Schwinn bike without hands on the bars, but for some inexplicable reason, I also kept my eyes closed on this joy ride down the block. At the same time my bike and body collided hard with our mailbox, the three Cantano brothers, who lived across from our house and were indisputably the meanest kids in the neighborhood, were playing stickball in the street and witnessed the entire incident. It took me weeks to recover from the physical scars–and much longer for the Cantanos to stop calling me a dumbass.

I relayed this tale the other day when our son youngest Sam asked me about the home where I grew up. “Mom, what do you remember most about the house you grew up in as a kid?” He asked, stretched out next to me on the leather chaise of our couch watching football videos, while I scrolled through the news. “Well, the bike-meets-mailbox accident was one of the most embarrassing things I recall about living in that house, but I mostly have great memories of growing up there.”



“Do you think your old house is still there?” he asked.



I hadn’t seen the house where I had spent my childhood and teenage years in decades.



“I don’t know,” Sam said, his tone thoughtful. “I just can’t imagine living anywhere but here. And I can’t picture any other family living in our house someday.”



Maybe it was all the months of quarantining, working, and virtual schooling together that had sparked his contemplation. Or just a 13-year-old’s developing perspective on life. My son couldn’t yet see the world that lay before him, beyond these here-and-now years and the four walls of our home in Virginia. I had forgotten how that felt.



“I get it, buddy,” I said, curling up closer to him on the couch. “Let’s look up my old house on Google Earth.” Seconds after giving him the address, Sam was zooming in on a satellite image of my family’s two-story colonial on Hazelwood Drive in southeastern Pennsylvania.



“Oh wow, that’s it,” I said. In an instant, I felt drawn back into this place I had spent 18 years of my life.



The house I grew up in during the 1980s was one of 50 new-construction homes dropped into a bucolic field about 25 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Our little enclave was marked by three defining features: an old fieldstone bridge spanning a creek, a narrow strip of woods, and a dilapidated barn the neighborhood kids were told to avoid. In my late 20s, I remember revisiting my childhood home and marveling at how puny and unimpressive the creek and woods looked. But as a 10-year-old kid, these vast and magical hideaways were places my brothers and our friends could go to build elaborate forts, hang rope swings, and investigate the verboten. By middle school, the west bank of the creek became a spot to practice kissing my first boyfriend and the woods a dependable cover for drinking the lukewarm Yuengling beers we’d pilfer from Mary Cardamone’s garage.



“So does the house still look like it did when you lived there?” Sam asked, as I continued studying the image more carefully.



“You know what, it really does,” I said. The sugar maple and white oak trees on our quarter-acre lot, just saplings when my parents moved here in 1975, shaded most of the front yard now. The same cream stucco and red shutters graced the exterior, but a bigger, better basketball hoop was installed in the driveway. “See that brick walkway leading up to the front porch,” I pointed out to Sam. “At least once a week, I’d walk out the front door for school and find a gutted mouse on the doormat. Our cat Smokey would wander all the way to the corn field to hunt for mice and then leave their bodies here for us to find.” I could tell my son, used to living in a neighborhood where wandering pets was practically a jailable offense, thought this a dubious tale.



“That was my bedroom,” I pointed out the two windows at the top right corner of the house. “Since I was the only girl, my parents thought I should have the biggest room.” Furnished with the dark dressers and queen bed from my grandparents’ former home, my bedroom was a wall-to-wall-carpeted assault on the eyes, adorned in frilly white curtains, periwinkle-flowered wallpaper, and life-sized posters of Rob Lowe and Bono. With no built-in entertainment like my brothers had with one another, I spent a great deal of time by myself in that room, reading Danielle Steele novels and dragging the extra-long, curly phone cord from my parents’ room into mine for two-hour calls with my friends.



“That is so stupid,” Sam said, rolling his eyes at the thought of talking on a phone with a cord. Or talking on a phone with friends at all. “I can’t believe you had to do that.”



My parents’ room was mostly off limits to us kids, but I’d snoop around in there anyway, checking out the lingerie in my mother’s dresser, slipping on her gold bangles, and spritzing the Chloe perfume on her vanity. At the foot of their four-post bed was a mothball-scented mahogany chest, where my mother kept our christening gowns and her family heirlooms, along with the Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, which she thought she had cleverly concealed under a fur stole. When I found this book in 8th grade, I remembering being shocked that my mother, an English teacher who I had never heard utter anything but the occasional “dammit,” would read a book with the f-Word used so liberally. I skipped these details with Sam about his grandmother.



“I bet Uncle Dave and Uncle Darren were slobs like Ben and Jake are,” Sam said, leaving himself out of his hygiene assessment of our home.



That was true. My brothers, one older and one younger, were content to live in bedrooms filled with the pervasive stench of dirty baseball socks and jockstraps. Sometimes we had to enter my older brother Dave’s room to access the attic, relishing in his embarrassment when we’d catch him playing Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher on his air guitar. My younger brother Darren’s room was a shrine to himself. An exceptional athlete, he treasured every medal and trophy he ever earned, amassing a cumbersome collection of plastic-gold plated figurines that he carefully arranged in order of prestige. The rest of his room was a sea of jerseys and school papers littering the floor and adorning his unmade bunkbeds.



I told Sam how our wood-paneled family room was where my mom always graded her students’ essays, while my dad watched the Villanova basketball games. Where my brothers would wrestle each other on the rust-colored carpet and play hours of Pac-Man with their friends. In the adjacent yellow-walled kitchen, we’d eat Cheerios and read the comics in the Philadelphia Inquirer before heading to high school in the mornings, and in the afternoons I’d help my mother cook dinner while she watched Oprah on the little TV with the giant antenna. Our basement, all cement and pipes and damp floors, didn’t have a movie theater or a wine cellar, but we loved playing epic rounds of ping pong down there and tending to my brother’s enviable beer can collection.



I’ve often longed for those ‘olden days’ of my childhood, when life felt simpler, with fewer rules and technology and stuff. My childhood home bonded our immediate family together and established my own place in the world, helping me feel capable and secure as I grew up. But I realize my own home today does the same thing at its core, serving the fundamental purpose that most childhood homes do for a kid. We’re just under a different roof here, in different times.

“Do you think anyone lives in your old house now, Mom?” Sam asked me, still finding it odd that multiple families could live in one home at different times.



“Definitely!” I said, touched by the innocence of his questions. “I bet another family has a kid just like you who is doing lots of the things you have in our home all these years. He’s probably playing manhunt with his friends at night, shooting baskets with his dad in the driveway, playing Xbox with his brothers, and maybe even helping his mom cook dinner.”



I couldn’t see this family on the Google Earth image of Hazelwood Drive. But I imagined people like my family lived there. They were carrying on tradition, doing all the unremarkable things that stringed together, somehow make up a childhood.