1Hey, so I was looking some old essays for my old NW class and I came upon this... lol, felt like putting something up. Tell me what you think...
The Hunt (of Houses)
"We're going to go look at a house, would you like to come with us?"
My answer to my mother's question was the same as always, "No."
"Are you sure?"
Cue the rolling of eyes, "Yes'm."
This exchange tended to happen quite often – not the rolling eyes bit, though that did occur quite a lot around my parents. What I'm speaking of is the "We're going to look at a house" part; my parents have been searching for a house for about six of the ten years we have lived in Oklahoma. And once again they were on the move.
Sigh.
I can't be sure what it was that tipped my parents off about the fact that we needed a new house. It might have had to do with the single bathroom that four people had to use or maybe it was the fact that their oldest daughter's room was an office. A really, really small office. So small that I could only fit a bed and dresser into the room and barely have room to turn in a circle. Either way, the hunt had begun and there was no stopping it, or them.
One of the first houses I remember was one that was located beside the Country Club's golf course. I had been semi–excited because a friend of mine lived in the neighborhood. The excitement was shortly lived, for the parental units soon after vetoed the house. I've lost count how many houses we looked at after that, but not to much later I told myself I was never going to look at a house again. What was the point of getting excited? I had also gotten used to my closet like room, even grown to like it.
Just about a year after my parents got the idea of moving states. Maybe back to Arizona or Indiana. Dad even thought about requesting a transfer to Philly or Washington D.C. This idea was fully backed by me, who wants to live in a small town anyway? I like my cities big, my surroundings noisy, and my lights bright. Unfortunately this idea fell threw, like so many others.
In fact, most all of the moving plans fell threw. So you should understand that when my parents came back from looking at the house – for the third time – and said: it's ours, I basically keeled over right there. Then three weeks later they're telling me to pack my stuff.
A joke right?
Not so much actually.
Another week and I find myself sitting on my bed in my new room. It felt like a parallel universe, my room was upstairs and four times as big as my last room. And the closet … I'm positive that its length is longer than my last room. I even had my own bathroom. But every good thing is usually accompanied by something bad. My bad thing was that I had no door to my room. You could just walk up the steps and: bang! There was my room, the absence of a door wasn't really as bad as it sounds – if you find it sounds bad at all that is. I had gotten a total upgrade so I really had nothing to complain about.
So I'm sitting on my bed looking around in contentment. I still lacked all of my possessions but we would be retrieving them that weekend.
My mother's shout floated up the stairs, "Ready to go to bed?"
My eyes rolled unconsciously, "Yes ma'am."
"Good, you've got a long day tomorrow. You may not be able to lift the heavy stuff because of your knee injury but you can still clean."
"Clean?" I was unfamiliar with the word; rooms somehow became messy and cluttered whenever I was in the vicinity.
There was no answer to my whispered word but only darkness. Mom had turned off the lights. Knowing she would most likely be waiting for me to get up and turn them back on, only to have her turn them off again. I did the only thing I could do until the tortures of the next day embraced me.
I slept.
Yes, yes. I know it was quite short. Only like 720 words or something - eh well. Tell me what you think!
- Andie