Sophie

Sophie

The Creek

ABOUT

This is a personal narrative I wrote in Humanities class this semester. The assignment was to hone in on a specific personal experience while writing in an implicit meaning as well. Writing this helped me work through some of the pain of moving out of my childhood home, so I hope you will see that reflected in my work.

NARRATIVE

The Creek 

The real estate brochure described it as a “park-like setting” and that’s exactly what I remember from my childhood there. My parents bought the house as I learned how to walk, so that is where I had my first steps. I grew up there, playing in the backyard, in the creek, on the swingset my uncle built, with the many chickens and cats, on the trampoline, with the jump ropes, sneaking into my neighbors yard to look at their ducks or to go on their tire swing, picking persimmons and mulberries, having concerts on the back patio, playing games with all the friends who came over, having potlucks, making movies, and going up the “secret stairs” covered with ivy in the very back of the yard to see if we could see the house from there. 

 

I didn’t realize how much it was going to hurt to move out of the house until we were gone. We sold it and moved all of our stuff out, and only until there was no going back did I really start to feel the pain. I was 10 at the time. The last time I was in the house was when we went to say goodbye with the friends I had grown up with playing in it: Aurora, Eva, Ella, Noah, and my sister. There was no furniture and it was all ready for the new family to move in, so we ran through it screaming the lyrics to our favorite songs at the time (the soundtrack of a musical called Once Upon a Mattress) to hear them echo. 

 

I tried to be excited about my new room, but it just wasn’t the same; although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was getting depressed. I wouldn’t want to spend time with my family, and I realized later that subconsciously it was because they were the ones who brought this pain by making us move. I would spend all my time in my room, listening to Adele CDs on repeat and rereading Harry Potter for the next three years. I didn’t talk to anyone really at home and would have to put on a fake smile at school. I ended up being so good at faking it that I became the funniest and most social person in the friend group. By 8th grade I wasn’t faking it anymore, and I was able to focus on my friends and stop thinking about the house so much. 

 

Soon we realized that this new house wasn’t right for us, so we found a larger house on a better property. There was a basement that could be the perfect movie room, a patio with a hot tub, and my room was a lot bigger and had so much potential. What was really exciting was that it had a creek in the backyard. I was stunned when I discovered that even though the new house was across town from my old house, the same creek ran through both yards; it was like coming home.