I am sure like me, there have been times when you have wondered what difference might have been made to your life, if your younger self had been gifted with the experience and knowledge you have accumulated over the years.

I invited several friends from the writing community to share their thoughts on this subject which I am sure you will enjoy as much as I did.

Today author Claire Fullerton shares her memories of the home that her mother grew up in and returned to with her own family when Claire was ten years old.

I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now! ‘Home’ by Claire Fullerton

79 Morningside Park

The house in which I grew up anchors me in the larger world as a frame of reference, although while I was growing up, this was an unrecognized fact. Youth takes given things for granted. I had no way of perceiving the snail-pace of change, that one day I’d walk out the door of the place I’d always called home and close it behind me forever.

The house had familial history. Built in 1901, it had eclectic features— intricate wrought-iron over a series of cathedral doors, a black-and-white tile entrance hall, a lattice-roof gazebo accessed by throwing open the doors of the card room. People in Memphis are mindful of the extreme summers, and fashion their homes accordingly. In the winter, area rugs ran throughout the house, and in the summer they were put away in storage.

Family lore is my mother’s parents went for a Sunday drive and left my then seven-year-old mother with her nanny. Pulling in the driveway of 79 Morningside Park, my general physician grandfather turned towards the passenger seat and said, “I hope you like this house because it’s yours.”

My mother, an only child, grew up in that Midtown, Memphis, four-bedroom house. She kept a Shetland pony in the backyard and rode it along the wooded trails of East Parkway. It was the home she returned to whilst away at boarding school in Simsbury, Connecticut. When she became engaged to my father, it was the setting of their lavishly orchestrated engagement party.

As a child, I visited the house every summer, when my mother took us home to see her mother. We lived up North in those days, my father being from the lake area outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The yearly trip my brothers and I took to Memphis opened our eyes to a disparate culture. To my young eyes, there was an austere tenor to my grandparent’s Southern home, an all-encompassing, echoing formality anchored by serious gravity. Because my grandmother, whom I am named for, loved collecting antiques, my brothers and I minded our footfalls when we visited, well aware that most things in the house were breakable.

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