The summer we moved away

In 1997, the summer between third grade and fourth grade, my family moved from St. John, Missouri to Lake St. Louis. My parents had a brand-new house built out there. It was an economy house, nothing fancy, but it was still a step up from the home I grew up in.

My parents stretched every dollar to make it happen. They painted the whole house themselves. They didn’t pay for a single extra phone line. None of the bedrooms got a ceiling fan or a ceiling light. Every bedroom had exactly one switch, and it controlled one outlet. If there was a corner to cut, they cut it, for better or worse.

Selling the old house was its own kind of drama. The woman buying it wanted everything perfect: a new roof, tour after tour, the works, and my parents were anxious enough to sell that they went along with all of it. I remember being home sick with the flu one day, bundled up in my parents’ bed because it was the comfiest spot in the house, when she insisted on a tour right then. So there I was, half-asleep and miserable, while a stranger wandered around the master bedroom inspecting it like I wasn’t even there. As far as I know she still lives in that house today, which is kind of wonderful all these years later.

The hard part was the goodbye. St. John was the only home and the only friends I had ever known: Patrick, Amber, Ashley, Sara, Autumn, Bradley, and a few more whose names have slipped away after all this time. I said goodbye to them the night before we left. Then I lay in my bed in the old house and it really hit me: this is the last night I will ever sleep here. Tomorrow, everything is new. A new house, a new school, a new bedroom that would be mine alone for the first time, since I had always shared one with my brother. New friends I would eventually have to go out and make.

I was excited and terrified in equal measure. I remember praying, wishing, hoping for the best, and telling myself that this was just the price of a big change. And in a lot of ways, it was.

The new school district turned out to be where my whole life took shape. I stayed in it all the way through high school, and it’s where I met Michael and most of the people I would eventually graduate with.

But here is the honest, bittersweet part. The neighborhood we moved into had almost no kids my age. I didn’t know that yet, standing in my new empty bedroom, but I would slowly find out, and a good chunk of my childhood ended up pretty lonely because of it.

There was one boy nearby, a few years younger than me, and for a long stretch he was the only kid around. It was a complicated, sometimes hard friendship, and I’ll leave most of it there. The moment I remember most came years later, when he told me he was about to go do something I knew was wrong and could genuinely hurt someone. I told him as plainly as I could: you can come with me right now and we’ll go play video games, or you can go do that, and if you do, we’re done. He went and did it. I think he tried to patch things up later, but I never really spoke to him again. From what I’ve heard, life since then has been a hard road for him, and that honestly makes me sad. He was smart, he was right there alongside me when computers were becoming a thing, and I always believed he had real potential. Sometimes I wonder how different it might have gone for both of us if there had just been a few more kids on that street to grow up with.

Moving away was the price of a better house and, eventually, a better life. But that last night in the old house, lying there certain that everything was about to change, is one I still remember exactly.