Persona Dolls

The House That Built Me

There’s an empty house that sits in the middle of a block. It has white siding and a green roof. It has an attached garage, a small block of concrete that makes up the front porch, and a large back yard. To look at it now, you might never know that this house was home to a family for almost fifty years.
When my mother was three years old, her father put the finishing touches on a house that he built with his own two hands. When my mother was three she moved, with her two sisters, her brother and both of her parents, into that house. She lived there until she met and married the man that would become my father.
While I was growing up I spent more time in this house, than I did the house that I actually lived in. My older brother and sister, and I, all spent our weekends at this house. We would go there to swim in the pool that use to be in the backyard, we would go there to spend time with our cousins that also spent their weekends there. We went there to spend time with our grandparents.
When I was fifteen, this house became my home when my parents, my brother and I moved in with my grandmother, after my grandfather passed away. We lived there for a year until my aunt moved in. we moved around a lot in this time, until we decided to go home, to my grandma’s house. We continued to live there with her until she passed away.
I’ve lived in many different houses in my life, but none of them were the home that my grandmother’s house was. Even after a fire destroyed everything inside the house that my grandfather built, my grandmother did her best to make it as it once was. She did her best to make it a home to all of us. Her children, her children’s children, and so forth.
There’s an empty house that sits in the middle of a block. To look at it now, you might never know that this house was home to a family for almost fifty years. But to me, a girl that called this house home for the first twenty years of her life, I will always remember it as the house that built me.