Disinfectant. If there is one word to aptly convey the history of homes I inhabited in my 20s, that would be it.
The first place I paid money to live in was on the top floor of a crumbling stucco building on a seedy street in my hometown. Its charms included peeling linoleum floors, balky faucets and a menagerie of insect life. It was so hot in summer months that ice cream melted in the bowl before you could find a spoon. You think I'm kidding.
The bathroom was a horror zone. One morning I unsuspectingly ran water for a bath (there was no shower) and left for a few minutes while the tub filled. When I came back the water was the color of a muddy stream and bugs were swimming in it. I opted for a sponge bath and never set foot in that tub again.
I hadn't thought about that apartment in decades, not until a staff retreat last fall when we began to imagine the "home" issue you are reading now. As an exercise, I asked members of our team to write vignettes about the best places and the worst places they had ever lived. The responses revealed how powerfully our lives are linked to where we hang our hats. And an interesting theme emerged—what made a home memorable were the people we knew when we lived there and the events that shaped who we became.
We all have stories.
My first job out of college was at a small newspaper in southern Indiana, where I covered everything from city council meetings to football games. My then-wife and I rented a tiny cottage for $90 a month. You read that right—$90. Its best feature was the landlady, a colorful elderly woman named Alta who lived in the main house nearby. She was fond of saying how "provoked" she was at this or that, as in, "I am so provoked at Johnny Bench." (She was a Reds fan.) We were young and poor and hundreds of miles from our closest relative, but in Alta we had a proxy grandma. We devoured her sassy commentary (and delicious banana pie) in greedy gulps on our frequent visits to her porch swing.
As my career improved, so did my abodes. There was the 1930s colonial on the edge of town that featured a walk-up attic I imagined someday converting into a bedroom. But the apple orchard next door was plowed under to make way for a giant retirement complex. We moved.
The house I bought in Maine was a midcentury modern with a fieldstone fireplace and cool built-ins. My son was born in that house. I built a deck on the front. After an ice storm pulled down power lines all over town, my wife and infant stayed with a friend while I lived for a week in the family room stoking the wood stove to keep the pipes from freezing. Memories.
I counted up all of the places I have called home. The tally is a tale in itself: Two countries, six states, 12 towns, 15 zip codes. Frankly, there are a few I would just as soon forget. But I don't regret living in any of them, including those that resembled the setting of a Dickens novel. And plumbing adventures aside, I confess to a certain romantic attachment to those early places because they were gateways to everything that came later.
Now I live in Palo Alto, where bungalows sell for $2 million. That leads to a lot of complicated feelings, yet I can't deny that after 16 years this feels like home. I've lived here twice as long as anywhere else. My son was raised here. And when I go back to the small Iowa town where I was raised, it no longer feels like home, sad to say. It belongs to someone else now, a new generation of kids who will one day set out to make homes for themselves, perhaps in some faraway and unfamiliar town, where they will smash bugs in their own sinks, and if they're lucky, have a neighbor who feeds them that essential nutrient called love.
Kevin Cool is the executive editor of Stanford.
