The brain is a funny thing. It plays tricks on itself, fooling you either by making you forget things or warping actual history and playing it back the way YOU want it to play. Showing you what you want to see instead of what's actually right there in front of you.

My Gram has been dead for a while now.

That is a fact.

The house I grew up in and spent so much time in has been burned to the ground for a long time now too.

That's a fact but it's one that comes back and punches me in the gut for whatever reason. It surprises me every time I wrap my mind around the concept.

The bar burnt down. The store was sold. My Gram is dead. My Granpop has a girlfriend.

All of them, facts that I know and can deal with.

The house being gone still hurts so many different ways.

... it wasn't just a house. It was my home and my haven and it was contained the spirit of everything I loved about my Grandparents, most everything good about our entire family. So much history. So many memories.

I've been back, only one time. It was about 3 years ago when I rode up to Pa. with Jeremy and Angela to see our Dad when he had the stents put in.

I walked around the perimeter and all of my memories built that house right back up to the last shingle.

The time I got caught sneaking out of my bedroom window.

The family celebrations and mostly my memories of Christmas.

The very first bedroom I ever had of my very own.

The purple walls in one room, the hand painted floors in the other room across the hallway that used to be my Uncle Joe's room but one that I took over when he moved out.

The time that Uncle Joe was messing around, showing me his new skills at karate and how I walked right the hell into that roundhouse kick and how I remember flying across the room just like on the cartoons. He felt so bad that it happened!

How scared I was to go into that full length closet in that back bedroom. It was like my own closet leading to Narnia. I'd get brave and poke in there among the furs and the gowns and the suitcases and the smells of so much history and time past in one place.

The slumber parties and sleepovers.

Oh and let's not forget the summer I conned Jeremy and Shannon into helping me paint that house! All two stories of it. God. I know they hated me for that!

I've never slept the sleep I had when I slept in that front bedroom that faced the highway. It was a two story house and the busy highway hummed at night with the sounds of semis going up and down the hills, down shifting, and the sound of jake brakes. The sounds would put me to sleep in no time. I loved them so much that I kept the window cracked open just a little even in the dead of winter.

In 7th grade, I got busted smoking in the girls room at school and was suspended for three days. I spent those days laying out on the roof above the front porch, catching some rays.

It drove my Gram crazy every time I climbed out on the roof but I just couldn't stay OFF of it. I even climbed to the very top part of the house a few times. It was a bit hairy getting back off but thankfully, I escaped without falling off.

How my Uncle and my Gram and I believed that house was haunted. It was only haunted from the laundry room in the back of the house through the dining room though. You were safe once you went upstairs and closed your door for the night. You couldn't have paid me cash money to get me to go back down after all the lights had been turned off and everyone was in bed for the night. I'd just as soon climb out the window to get out.

The movie nights that Joe and I would have. We would rent the scary flicks and sit there eating calzones or pizza that we picked up in Bradford. I sure did love my Uncle Joe. He was only about 20 years older than I was so he was still rather young when I was a teenager. I thought he was the coolest of cool.

I was always welcome to come home. For any length of time. My Gram never once turned me away or made me feel unwelcome or that I shouldn't be there. Even after I moved out and on with my life. Circumstances drew me back down to Marshburg again.

All the talks we had at that round kitchen table. The hundreds of hands of solitaire I watched my Gram play. All the games we'd play together. Watching my Grands and their best friends Donny and Emma Jean play hands of euchre. I'd siddle in and sit and listen to the grown ups laughing and cutting up.

I miss the summer mornings when I'd wake up early and head downstairs and my Granpop would be sitting at that round oak table in the kitchen, listening to morning radio, drinking his coffee and sitting around in his robe before getting up and around for the day ahead. The way the sun shone into the kitchen in the morning, directly through the east window by the stove.

Sometimes though, the only thing I wanted to do was escape out of that house. As a teenager I couldn't stand to be stuck there on the weekends.

But then, I always thought it would be there to come home to.

I'd give anything to be able to go back and watch me live it again. I'd not want to change anything, I'd just want to memorize every detail and memory instead of just live it. I'd want my memories for later.... for times like this when I'm missing a home that's been gone for so long.