The large off white apartment building with green wooden window panels and a fully primed yard is my home as it has been the house my grandparents owned while my father was young. I have been to this house my whole life and even stayed here most weekends. This house has given me many memories. My home has seen me at my most fragile state, and yet my strongest. For this house, I am home.
My favorite memory is helping my grandmother garden and tend to her grapevine thats in the backyard. My grandmother and I were always up to something during the summer time we were always outside unless the weather permitted. She taught me how to hand wash and dry clothes on the clothsline, how to water her variety of pink flowers that lined the side of her garage and when to pick the grapes off the grapevine. I loved the taste of the fresh purple seeded grapes that we would pick together after she washed them.
I remember my first pink Barbie bike with the training wheels and riding up and down the driveway until I advised I didn’t need the training wheels anymore and from that moment on I was learning how to rollerblade. Rollerblading in the driveway was hard my grandma handed me two kinds of rollerblades a dark blue pair with 4 wheels that my father owned at one point and the bright green rollerblades with just three wheels that she bought me. She always watched me while she would broom the leaves or dirt from the driveway. I loved to make my grandmother proud of me any chance I got. For example, I bought my first car with the money I saved over time. Although it was a flashy teal 1994 Ford Mustang. I remember after I registered my car my grandparents house was the first destination I wanted to go. I loved pulling into that driveway and being greeted with the worlds brightest smile.
When I lived upstairs above my grandparents as a toddler, my room was painted pink and the ceiling fan was a gift to my parents from their wedding. I spent a lot of time learning how to walk and talk. I took my first steps in the living room downstairs at my grandparents as my mother and my siblings spent a lot of time with them while my biological father worked or wasn’t around.
I had some of my strongest points and my weakest points in this house. My Grandmother was diagnosed with dementia and as it progressed at a high rate of speed. I have made the decision to help care for her. As a new mother with a daughter who was less than one years old I had moved to the same second floor apartment that I had lived in at her age to take care of the woman who has always taken care of me. My daughter, Ariana, who sleeps in the same timeless room I did, has had her first steps, her first words, and is learning more and more as the days pass. She was able to do some of the same things I have done at her age at the same house and driveway as I did.
As the year has passed my grandmother had rapidly gotten worse with dementia and ultimately had passed away in her home with my grandfather holding her hands and her two sons, and her only three grandchildren by her side. This home has seen every moment whether it was cooking, cleaning, birth, illness and death. This home has also seen strength, courage, tears, and unity. This house will continue to grow with me and my daughter and all the rest of our milestones ahead. Much like the growing grapevine, This house has seen me grow as a person and continues to.