Grant Street

This is the story of a house.

It was born two years after the Wright brothers took their first historic flight, orange-hewn bricks laid lovingly by hand in a very young and unestablished cow-town nestled against the Rockies. It witnessed the change of Denver from the wild, wild west into a cosmopolitan, sought after city.

This place, too, is the story of my youth.

It is the story of young love and wine-stained kisses, of family singing Bohemian Rhapsody with abandon at my dad’s 60th birthday, and of my grossly pregnant self climbing a precariously-situated ladder to lovingly decorate the nursery of a child who would decimate my reality with her demand that, in conjunction with her own birth, a mother be born, as well.

It is the story of desperate loneliness as my daughter wailed in the darkest parts of the night and my husband rocked her back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, in the cave of our basement until she finally, exhaustingly, fell asleep. It is the story of midnight tears and milk-stained shirts and the loyalty of dogs who followed me around a creaking floor, sleepily in the cold, dark night.

It is a love story, once nourished by late-night movies, fancy dinners, and karaoke bars now nourished by the laughter of children, by dancing in the living room with uncoordinated toddler feet, and the knowledge that not only can your partner slam an Irish car bomb with the best of them, he can also rock an inconsolable child to sleep. It is bearing witness to the birth of your partner’s parent self; to the quiet goodnight kisses, the loving placement of band-aids, and the inevitable day after day after day of poop and baths and meals and clean up put on repeat ad infinitum.

This is the story of the second child who came roaring into the world without a care for anyone else’s plans, who was delivered with such ease that he did not emit a peep as they laid him on my chest and his little baby hand brushed my cheek. It is the story of a daughter becoming a sister and a second child proving that no amount of child-proofing is adequate for the tenacity and stubbornness of a one-year-old with a sister to emulate. It is the tale of a head so large one must first learn to crawl without lifting your skull from the carpet, fighting your sister for the ONE book (of dozens) that you both need to read at the same exact moment, and the presence of a perpetual cold that seems simply to pass from one to the next to the next so that no one is ever actually healthy.

This is the story of a home that has borne witness to the joy and pain and transformation of my numbered days and in doing so has become inextricably linked with the taste of these memories. It has seen the transition from young lover’s toes touching in the early morning hours to the chaos of little humans still exuberant with the joy of being alive.

In the aged, rope-hung windows, my daughter is emitting her first giggle. In the curved, hand-carved staircase, my son is pridefully taking his first, stuttered step. In the hundred-year old creaks of the oak floors is the sly, charming smile of a young man who has yet to become the kind of father his children will try to mirror. When in a few short weeks, we lock the front door and walk down the steps for the final time, it is in the memory of the rocking chair perched outside of my daughter’s first nursery that I will find myself as I look back, young and naive and reborn by the trial of motherhood, rocking and rocking and rocking until the night enfolds us both in sleep.