Lesson 2:1 – And I’m Home

Closing my eyes for a moment, I took a deep breath, then strode through the front door and entered the familiar foyer. Everything was where I left them, the usual knick-knacks in their various places. As I made my way further into the house, I passed by the small library room, filled with books (not all of them good, mind you). Next to the library was the small theatre room where I usually relax and enjoy my favourite shows and movies. Further into the house is, to my chagrin, a rather dusty exercise room. Walking through the hallways, my hand traces the familiar scars in the walls, each with a story of its own. At the next turn would be a picture with a faded image of that day, years ago, at the beach with my family. You can’t really make out what we’re doing, but the big smiles on our faces says it all: we’re having fun. Making my way further into the house, I dread the next turn, the next room I would find. It looks like the other rooms of the house, but this is the only one with a locked door. I know where the key to this door is; I even enter this locked room every once in a while, but not today. I heard barking a little ways down the hall and I smiled – there she is! Flubby is a looking a little mangy, but she bounds up to me, standing on her hind legs, little paws just barely reach up past my knees. We continue walking through the halls together, her chewing up the occasional slipper and I enjoying the various photos of myself and my friends and family up on the walls. I noticed Flubby making a beeline for a picture book on the ground. Recognizing the picture book, I raced over and rescued the book before it became a chew toy. It was a book my mother used to read to me. Well, it doesn’t actually have words in it so I suppose I shouldn’t say “read”. The story goes a little like this:

There was a mother duck with her three ducklings. One day, on the way to school, one of the ducklings sees a pond in a fenced up house. Noticing that the gate is slightly ajar, the little duckling sneaks in to play in the pond while its siblings continue their walk to school, unaware that their adventurous sibling had gone off to play. Later, the little duckling, having had enough fun, decides to leave the pond and join its siblings at school, but finds the gate locked shut. Meanwhile, the other two ducklings return home to tell their mother that they lost the third duckling. The mother makes her way down the same path that her children travel everyday and hears her little duckling crying, stuck behind the locked gate. Tying rope to a bucket, she throws the bucket over the gate, her little duckling crawls in, and she hauls him out.

My mother managed to add something extra to the story every time she told it to make the story new and interesting. Looking up from the story, I realized that Flubby had left and the room around me seemed hazy somehow, shimmering like a mirage. I found what I was looking for though, and I made my way back to the front of the house and shut the door behind me. I’ll be back soon.

Author’s Note:

I didn’t really know what to write for this week’s assignment, which was this: “write a short story that describes your sense of home and the values and stories that you use to connect yourself to your home” (Paterson, “Lesson 2:1”). If this were an assignment to simply describe what home meant to me, then I would have had a more straightforward answer. To make a story, though, about what home was to me was, for some reason, difficult for me to wrap my mind around. What inspired the story above is BBC’s Sherlock  and the idea of the mind/memory palace. I have a really bad memory – I tend to remember things in broad strokes or not at all. When I do remember details, they tend to be odd, useless details. I do have a decent short term memory, which is why the foyer of my story is so cluttered, but beyond that, it’s hallway after hallway, with rooms that are generalized by what they seem to contain. Even the most terrible memory holds onto some of the precious moments of the past though, and for me, two of those memories is my dog and my mom reading me bedtime stories. For me, home is a place where the memories that were made still have a hold, shaping my identity and the foundations of my perception.

Works Cited

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:1 | ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genre 98A May 2014.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genre 98A May 2014. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 June 2014. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl47098amay2014/unit-2/lesson-2-1/>.

“Sherlock.” BBC One. BBC, n.d. Web. 10 June 2014. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018tt

Zielinski, Sarah. “History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian.”History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 June 2014. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/secrets-sherlocks-mind-palace-180949567/>.