Each day after kindergarten my mother would drop me off at my grandparent's house before she headed to work. We were Italian; children were raised by family members, not daycare. Instead of graham crackers and apple juice I ate pasta alfredo and eggplant; trips to the mall via the bus and walks down Main Street took the place of slides and tire swings. I would run all over the house and outside but I never dared venture into the basement unattended. That was where the furnace lived, a menacing iron beast which could come alive at any time and eat me. Every Sunday my grandmother would bring forth a steaming plate of lasagna or homemade macaroni for my entire family to gorge on. We'd eat until our stomachs ached, splattering tomato sauce all over our church clothes, and afterward we'd sit slumped back in the weathered couches, sipping wine (soda for me and my sister) and occasionally arguing. It was always warm in that house, even when snow laced the twinkling Christmas lights my grandmother set up every year.

That was the house my grandparents bought when they came to this country in the 1950s. There were no credit cards. No expensive clothes. There was a position in a factory as a seamstress for my grandmother and an opening at a construction company for my grandfather, but for two young immigrants who came from rural nothingness, blue collar employment and a roof above their heads was more than enough. My mother grew up in that house. I grew up in that house. During the summer, the basement with the menacing furnace doubled as a winery and cannery. I was in that house when my sister was born; I remember my father frantically answering questions from my overjoyed grandmother as he jockeyed between her living room and the hospital. Years later, when my grandfather passed away, that house never quite felt the same. Now it is gone.

The town bought the house when my grandmother was put into a nursing home last summer. The house is in a prime location: right next to the police station. The town had been eying it for years; now they owned it and could do as they pleased. So today, in the very spot where my grandmother sat on her couch, crocheting countless blankets, where that menacing furnace used to grumble, where all our Christmas dinners were prepared, there is a parking lot. A police cruiser sits on an American dream; the people who walk across that pavement are unaware of just how valuable that old building meant to the Italian immigrants who toiled to make it theirs. My grandparents embody every trait this country was founded on: sacrifice, determination, hard work and simplicity; instead of being remembered, their existence is steamrolled to make way for something more convenient, something more useful.

I have not seen that parking lot and I never will. When I try to picture in my mind what it could possible look like, I'm only able to envision the old house and its yard overgrown with sunflowers. I've often felt that little by little, the world as I knew it to be has been crumbling away; now I am met with a definitive thud as the book of my past shuts forever. My childhood is over. The places I remember no longer exist. The people who star in my memories have either died or are trapped in nursing homes, shrouded by dementia where I cannot reach them. I suppose this happens to everyone. I suppose there is a point where you are no longer tied to the people and places who made you, but to what you strive to be. I strive not to wallow in the past but to embrace the future, to mold it, to leave my mark on it. I'll miss that house.