You can go home again.

Yes, it is possible to go home again. It’s just littler.

I remember the first winter break I came home from college. I’d left my dormitory shower room, with its wall of sinks and room of showers and came home to my parents’ house … with its single, tiny, little sink and shower. The counter seemed made for midgets as I had to stoop over to brush my teeth. Were college counters higher because there were no children there? The whole return home experience seemed like a voyage to Lilliput.

In our last visit to New York, my sister Elizabeth and I decided to explore New Jersey. I lived there from age four to eight, and she was born there. We actually drove up to our old address. We had not been back there since 1962. 56 years.

Yet I knew the curve in the street! I knew where my friend Karen used to live! I knew this place!

Except that almost all the houses had sprouted second floors or additions. They were bigger, swollen over their lots. But not ours. Ours was the little ranch house I remembered. From the outside.

The current owner, Jen, let us in.

How could a family of six have lived in that house? Where did we eat? In the itsy-bitsy kitchen?? I do remember we couldn’t open cabinets or the refrigerator when we were all seated at supper, but how did we even walk through the kitchen? How did my mother cook in there? Did we ever have relatives over for Thanksgiving or Passover? There was no way a single other person could have sat at our kitchen table.

How did we ever fit? The dining room was our living room. That’s where the couch, TV, and Dad’s chair was. How did it all fit??? Even Jen couldn’t imagine it. I’m pretty sure I watched TV from the floor.

No wonder our main play area was outside or in the basement.

The full basement was acres and acres of interesting stuff to play with. My father’s workshop, my mother’s laundry area (with her ironing mangle!), the place where old interests died (the fish tank, for example), and my own personal area: under the stairs, with my father’s old electronics (an oscilloscope!). The basement was our domain.

If you asked me, I’d say we had to go down twenty steps to get way, way down to the basement.

At Jen’s house, there were seven steps.

I can still describe the bookshelves with the Golden Book Encyclopedias in the living room, the pink cement patio we used to chalk whole cities on (which is still there, under Jen’s deck), the Book of Knowledge bookcase behind the couch, my mother’s philodendrons climbing to the ceiling and serving as a room divider. I can close my eyes and remember Home.

So I sat on my couch, in my Anchorage living room, and looked around. I looked at the bookshelf full of books and the other full of games. At the pottery from Mexico, the painting from a silent auction, the flea market couch that’s been reupholstered twice. The lamps that fall over, the beanbag chairs and pillows I made years ago, the ivy that climbs up the fireplace wall. The three different colors I picked for the walls.

“Guess what I’m thinking,” I said to Tim.

“That our home is homey,” he said.

How did he know that? That was exactly what I was thinking.

It must have been the smile on my face.