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The article is subjective and expresses the personal opinion of the author.
Once there was a house that sat on a hill.
There was a young girl who visited her grandparents there.
That young girl loved the house.
She loved the smooth, worn wood of the bannister on the stairs.
The creak of the steps that led to a landing with a bench and windows that overlooked the garden in the backyard.
The coal from bygone days left in the windows of the stone basement.
She loved the porch on the side of the house where she would lounge for hours in the wicker chaise reading her books and looking out at the plum tree given to her on the day she was born.
The closets full of her grandmother’s skirts, blouses, and high-heeled shoes.
The small room in the back of the second floor covered in floral wallpaper.
The swinging door between the dining room and the hallway that led to the kitchen with scratched and worn butcher block counters.
Though the girl grew up there — in part — one day she had to leave and move far away.
And soon her grandparents sold the house and moved to a neighboring town.
But the girl never stopped missing the house and all that had happened there.
She missed the smells of garlic and onion wafting from the kitchen as her grandmother prepared dinner.
The clink of ice in the glasses when her grandfather served lemonade in the heat of summer.
The splash of water as she jumped into the pool and felt the cool water embrace her.
She missed the faint murmurings of adult conversations after she had gone to bed and waited for sleep to come.
The family dinners with the table cloths and linen napkins and candlelight.
The puppet shows that she and her cousins orchestrated and performed for the adults after supper.
One day the girl returned to the town and drove past the house.
The place deeply embedded in the essence of her childhood.
There it was — the house on the hill.
It was the same, yet different.
Smaller somehow — less legendary and more ordinary.
And the girl thought about how she was no longer a girl at all, but a woman with her own house and her own family.
And how her son was growing to love the settings of his childhood and create memories of his own.
And how places and memories are tricky.
How they are the same, but different.
Always there, but shifting subtly as she needs them to.
As she remembers them in different light, through varied lenses of experience.
And now — now she understands what her uncle meant when he said that it is “just a house” and will never be the same as it was.
Even if she could walk through the front door and run her hand along the wooden bannister and walk out onto the side porch to see the plum tree still growing in the backyard.
The voices, the memories, the emotions — they are all impressions from long ago.
And the woman drove away.
Because all that is left there now is the house on the hill.
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