We were still grieving our parents when the HOA knocked on our door and told us to leave the only home we had ever known. They called us a violation. But we weren’t going to let them erase our family that easily.
My name is Claire, and I’m 20 years old. My sister, Iris, is 18. We still live in the house we grew up in, the only place we’ve ever truly called home.
And I don’t mean that as a figure of speech. I mean it in the most literal sense. Our parents brought me here straight from the hospital after I was born, and Iris followed two years later.
Every corner of this place holds a piece of our family’s story. It’s not some picture-perfect magazine house. The walls have scratches.
The paint in the upstairs hallway is chipped. There’s a faint pink stain on the carpet near the dining table where Iris once knocked over a bottle of cranberry juice during a holiday dinner. But to us, this house is memory, comfort, and history all wrapped into one.
Dad bought it with Mom twenty-eight years ago, back when they were still figuring life out. He used to say it was the only thing he ever got right on the first try. Over the years, they turned this house into a home, and then into a world just for us.
There’s a dent in the hallway wall from when I rollerbladed indoors at 10 and crashed headfirst into the coat rack. The driveway still has faint chalk outlines from our never-ending hopscotch competitions. Even now, if I stand outside on a warm afternoon, I swear I can smell the grilled corn and Dad’s famous barbecue ribs in the air.
Every summer, he’d fill the backyard with picnic tables, overloaded with potato salad, baked beans, burgers, and that weird zucchini dish only Mom liked. She’d laugh whenever we pulled faces trying to avoid it. When it rained, we built real blanket forts, not the kind people just talk about, but the kind that took over the entire living room.
Iris and I would drag every chair we could find into place, then throw sheets and blankets over them to make tunnels and secret hideouts. Meanwhile, Mom would be in the kitchen baking banana bread, and the sweet smell would drift through the house, mixing with the sound of thunder outside. Sometimes we would all sit together on the front porch, counting the seconds between the flash of lightning and the rumble that followed.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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