My sister is moving to a new house. You wouldn't think this would be a monumental event in my life, since it involves my sister and her family selling their current house, packing, doing the hundreds of tasks that go along with a change of address, settling into the new house, changing school districts for my nephew, etc. You would be wrong. The reason behind the trauma associated with this event for me is that my sister still lives in the house we grew up in. From pre-birth to age 20 I lived in that house, sharing the tiny front bedroom with my sister, longing for a house with an upstairs (ours was a late 1950s ranch), doing, well, *stuff* in the hammock that hung out back between the maple trees my father had planted expressly to accommodate a hammock. Although the hammock is still there, one of the maple trees is now gone (my father planted three - one as a spare - he was always the consummate planner), along with the flowering cherry trees and the hemlocks and many of the gracefully arching birches, taken by age, disease, and weather. The cows are long gone from the pasture behind the house, and the land has been sold to a developer who will make it over into a golf course, once the litigation winds to its inevitable conclusion. The next door neighbors are no longer my grandparents, but rather a large family that has created numerous conditions over the past few years that have warranted health department intervention. The well water is not quite as sweet as it once tasted, crisp and chilled from deep underground. They do have cable TV now, though access to public sewers is still some years in the future (the connection between those two subjects is only in your mind). The cluttered, cobwebby basement where I spent so many hours, lost in my own world, is clean and finished now. But the maple cabinets and copper-colored Formica countertops are still originals, as are the hardwood floors buried under the wall-to-wall carpeting. The screened-in porch, which we covered with heavy plastic sheeting for so many winters to provide a place for our compulsively destructive basset hound, Dagmar, to stay when the house was empty is also intact. The view of Bowman's Tower in the distance, built during the Depression with the help of the Works Progress Administration and my great-grandfather, is still there, giving the street its name. The hill I walked up to the bus stop, slid down in the winter, and whose gravel is still embedded in my knee, seems gentler now, not as steep. The dead-end street beside our house (we had not yet discovered the marketing power of the term "cul-de-sac") still makes me wince when I think of the scars it left on my face the day I ran down the slope of our yard toward it, my arms outstretched, convinced that I could fly.

I moved on long ago. Now I'll need to move on again, this time a bit farther, a bit more permanently. But before I do, I'll walk in the yard one more time, look out over the tangled fields, and feel the swirl of childhood all around me.