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My home for the last 18 years of my life was torn down Tuesday April 9, 2009. My family and I have been waiting for this day to come since the middle of June last year, when the decision was decide that we were not going to be able to rebuild. The house was ruined from the flood last summer. The foundation was washed out in the basement and very unsafe to even enter it afterwards. Leaving it hard for us to enter it and retrieve all of our belongings that were still okay. Even though most of our things were ruined and contaminated, everything on the second floor was fine. To watch my home that my father had built with his own hands by himself be demolished with in hours, made me sick, how could this happen, a house that took about three years to fully complete come down in a couple hours, to where it is almost like there was never anything there in the first place. Watching them hit the house with the claw I will never forget, it made an indescribable sound that made me sick to my stomach, as if some one was stabbing me… as the house was torn into, room by room, memory by memory flashed by. What made it worse was seeing things that I had forgotten about be picked up by the tractor’s claw and being dropped into a huge dump truck. It was almost as if I wanted to scream stop and run to get the left behind object.
I am not sure what is worse, the house not being there or the house still standing and not being able to live there. I know that I will never forget all the good times that have happened in that house in my childhood. Either way, it is still my home in my mind, and I will always just want to go home.
I know that a lot of people reading this is probably think that this really is no big deal because it is just a house and now that I have a new house because of this event, that I should be over to and move on. Well it really doesn’t work like that. It was more than just a house, it was a home that I and my four siblings all grew up in, it had its own stories to it, all the odd things that my father had built into it for reasons that nobody knows. I love that place.