I’m in yet another hotel bathtub. This time, in West Virginia.

We stopped at my childhood home this morning. The house is being renovated, and I was able to go through the whole thing.

Several months ago, I wrote about the Brady Bunch home renovation, and said that I could not connect with the Romeo home. I was wrong about that.

I thought I would just drive by and shoot a picture from the road. I thought I might go down Inwood and hike the old gravel pit fields behind the house. I wanted to see the back of the barn that I wrote about in Flash Meridian.

At first glance, the house looked derelict. It looked like it was in ruins. The whole thing looked like it was falling apart.

I felt very sad. We drove on by, and made a right turn on Inwood, but trees and brush had grown up so high I couldn’t see a thing. In the old days, you could see the whole farm from Skyline Ranch.

I felt I had lost the house again, first physically, and now even the fantasy of it was gone.

I went back to the front of the house and pulled in the driveway. The construction sign looked like a for sale sign.

Someone was in the yard, and Helena encouraged me to talk to him.

“You’re personable,” she said.

And so I did.

“I lived here 50 years ago,” I explained. He introduced me to the new owner.

I knew so much about the house. Not only the physical details, but names and dates. Neighbors. The original owners.

The outbuildings were sagging. The orchard was gone. The merry-go-round and barbecue were no longer there. The kitchen and dad’s office were gutted. The only finish I recognized was grampa’s paint in the breezeway.

We walked through the house and I talked nonstop. I remembered everything. The window seat and bumpy plaster on Jonathan’s wall. The secret hiding place under the bottom shelf in Mark’s closet.

I looked in my own closet to see if any of my notes remained on the wall.

The rooms felt much smaller. Everything was overgrown.

The silo roof was gone, but I knew that from the satellite images.

After we left, I spent the rest of the day driving and muttering “wow”. My emotions ran high.

I could not believe that it had actually happened. I stood in those spaces. I looked out those windows. I even looked in the closet where Ditto nursed her kittens. I stood where I stood that Peach Festival weekend, where, after the parade, Sandy came down from his perch in the garage to greet me. He was snapped up by Pax who crushed him in her jaws, and he and I both screamed in horror until he was dead.

I stood in the room where I refused to put the trombone to my lips during that final lesson. It was the first time I stood up for myself.

I drove and cried and laughed and said “wow” over and over, searching for other words I could use.

The house is loved again and still, and is being renovated with new materials as well as respect for its history.

I’ve regained the reality and the fantasy as well as a new friend.

Now my son and I share an experience on that property. For me, a flood of memories and for him, the black rat snake in the deep end of the pool.

I will have much more to say about this, because if I could have gone anywhere in the world, it would have been exactly there. If I had known how to make it unfold perfectly, it would have been exactly that.