We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place. We stay there, even though we go away, and there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there. Pascal Mercier

I awoke with a start, just 90 minutes after putting down my Ruth Ware mystery and turning out the light. I took a deep breath, but could only recall wispy images of my dream. The setting, my childhood home, was the only detail I was sure of.

Unlike my children who lived in half a dozen different houses, the entire arc of my life with my parents was confined to the home I was born in. A green corner house on Hurst Avenue and Patio Drive in San Jose, California purchased in 1958 just after they had gotten married. I joined them there three years later.

Built in 1954, the house was poorly planned with pockets of wasted space, a narrow hallway running between the bedrooms, a closet-sized half bath and a full-sized bath shared by everyone in the house including guests. But the maze-like design meant there was lots of extra wall space for my mother to hang her watercolors, and the proliferation of windows kept the inside bright and light on all but the darkest days.

I left home to attend college, returning only for vacations and holidays. For a time, my bedroom remained intact, a still life museum of the child and young woman I’d been – French Impressionist posters on the wall, a shelf full of well-loved stuffed animals and stacks of 19th century English novels mixed with cheesy romances. But eventually, my parents replaced the twin bed with a queen, and my mother remade the far corner into her home office.

I visited Mom and Dad regularly, eventually introducing first Jimmy, then Molly to its cozy, quirky interior. They slept side-by-side on blow-up mattresses in the dining room and ate bagels and challah at the kitchen table. They swam in the small, unheated pool in the backyard and curled up next to my mom on the purple couch in the family room as she read to them. Very little changed with the passing of time. A fresh coat of green paint on the exterior every ten years. New appliances when their 20-year-old predecessors could no longer be repaired. The house even survived the Loma Prieta earthquake, a cracked shower pan the only damage. Like my father, whose energy and curiosity didn’t dim with age, the house felt solid and enduring as though it would stand forever.

Dad died first, departing from my parents’ back bedroom six months after his 102nd birthday. But in the decade that followed, I had no trouble finding him whenever I visited. His presence was everywhere, from the meticulously organized folding teak desk in his home office to the staticky battery powered radio in the kitchen where he had sat listening to San Francisco Giants’ games while waiting for dinner. The objects he’d used or worn still pulsed with his energy. I could shut my eyes and hear his steady baritone voice calming my fears or offering me advice.

When Mom died thirteen years later in the sunny front bedroom that had once been mine, I had no choice but to sell the house. The realtors worked hard to find a family to buy it, but the placement of the water main wouldn’t allow a downstairs remodel, and the roof was too weak to hold a second story. Eventually, it went to a builder who immediately tore it down and erected a McMansion with huge rock pillars and fake white shutters glued to the outside walls. He reoriented his brand new structure toward the other street, eliminating not just the original address but virtually any trace of its precursor on the internet. Even the Google Street view purporting to be of my childhood home has a picture of the two-story house that replaced it.

But the the biggest punch was the builder razing the entire lot. Gone was my mother’s flower garden, the xeriscape landscaping she’d designed herself and the carnation pink flowering cherry tree my grandmother had given her just after I was born. I grew up playing under its branches, then climbing them as the tree and I grew older and stronger together. I sometimes wonder if any of the roots remain under the generic planting and bright green lawn. Whether they hold any memories of my mother and me still.

It took years for my grief over the destruction to surface, buried as it was under the weight of Jimmy’s death, followed in rapid succession by my mom’s the following year. The sale and scraping of the house happened within months of Mom’s passing, leaving me with a U-Haul truck’s worth of possessions and papers to sort through and no headspace to process the pain of what had just been stripped from me.

I have plenty of belongings to remind me of both of my parents, yet I’m envious of those whose childhood homes are still standing. Even if the houses been repainted, remodeled or relandscaped, I imagine some of their essence remains. A place to drive by and remember where the family was alive together.

Between rentals and the homes my husband and I have owned, I’ve moved around a lot. Yet I never dream of any other place I’ve lived in, despite all the happy memories they hold. Instead, in my dreams, I am only ever back in that sunny corner house, my mind populating its rooms with the people I long for – my mom and dad, my son and the relatives who helped raise me. It’s still the safest place I know. The one place that will never stop being home.