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My mother’s drive-bys began even before mine.

Twelve years after my father died, my mother remarried and moved into her new husband’s rambler on the other side of town. Shortly after, she sold the house our family had lived in on Vernon Street for 30 years to “an unmarried woman, a lawyer, who works morning to evening. Why would she need a house the size of ours, just to sleep in all by herself?”

Mom’s updates came periodically, over lunch or at a family gathering.

“She’s not taking care of my flower beds.”

And the one that seemed to hurt her the most: “She’s cut down the hickory tree. There’s just a hole torn in the yard where it used to be.”

Courtesy of Melanie McCabe

That she would grieve for the hickory was a surprise. Every autumn, hickory nuts and broken shells would rain down on our lawn, turning the grass into a rolling minefield of debris. My weary mother was out front constantly, armed with a rake.

I had thought she loathed that tree. But I was wrong. After her description of its uprooting, I drove by to witness the scene for myself. The lawn that had once seemed alive to me, moving constantly in a pattern of sunlight and shadow, now looked scorched, brown and sad.

I soon learned that if I drove by at night, sometimes the blinds would be raised, and I could see into the brightly lit rooms. Only once was I ever seen — my car was idling at the curb when a woman peered out a window at me. It was twilight, and I could plainly see the white shape of her face, though I had to imagine the squinting of her eyes, the furrowing of her brow as she puzzled over my intentions. Panicked, I scrambled to put the car in drive and took off. As I wheeled around the cul-de-sac, I looked again. The woman was still there. And she was watching me.

That evening was several decades ago. But it was not the end of my forays into house stalking. For many years, as I raised my daughters, I found reasons to travel through that neighborhood on my way somewhere else.

One afternoon, my teenage daughter was with me, and we saw a young man on the front steps, smoking a cigarette.

“Oh, my God. There’s someone outside,” I said, speeding up, embarrassed, ready to flee.

Suddenly my daughter put her hand on my arm and yelled, “Stop the car!”

Startled, I braked, and before I understood what was happening, she stepped out and approached the young man.

“Hi,” she called out to him. Her pretty face and long, blowing hair seemed to strike him speechless.

“My mom grew up in this house,” she continued. “Do you think we could go in and take a look around?”

He shrugged. “Sure. I guess. Why not?”

The first thing that struck me was how compressed everything looked. As a child, the house had seemed spacious, ample enough to contain the five lives that resided there. I had last stood in this living room when I was 30 years old, hardly a child. Had I not noticed its size because I saw it only as home, as a place that defied physical dimensions?

Awkwardly, I moved around the first floor, peering into my grandmother’s bedroom rather than entering it. It was someone else’s space now.

The kitchen was tiny. A narrow strip of appliances and counter space. And yet, somehow, my sister and I had eaten our Frosted Flakes every morning at a table near the window, while my mother darted back and forth, while my grandmother made tea, while my father read the newspaper at the breakfast bar. Into that kitchen sink I had tipped my long hair, my small body lying on the green counter, while my mother scrubbed my head with Prell shampoo.

Our host tagged behind us. I longed to venture upstairs into my old bedroom. I wanted to descend into the basement to see if it remained as I remembered it: the long bar with its red leather stools, the wall of glass blocks, the red and black floor tiles. But it seemed presumptuous to further invade this private space. I thanked the young man and we left. Immediately, I regretted not being pushier. I might never get another chance. But I wanted much more than to merely walk through it. I wanted to spend hours in it, alone. I wanted to explore every cranny. I wanted to wait in its silent air to discover if I was truly alone there, or if some vestige remained of those who had shared that house with me.

I wondered whether my fixation with the house marked me as unusual. After I posted online about my obsession, dozens of friends shared their experiences, and I saw that my feelings were not uncommon at all.

“Going back to my old town and street is like taking an intoxicant. A strong one,” Pam wrote. “And I’m never satisfied, even though I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

Jeff said that he often drives by his former home. “Sometimes I park the car and try to peek around the premises. … It makes me sad to think of someone else living in my house.”

Francesca and Rebecca have both been back into their childhood homes. Rebecca’s walk-through when it was on the market left her philosophical: “It was different inside and out, but my grandmother will always be there.” Francesca tells me she is always invited inside when she returns to her hometown. “It makes me happy,” she says, “to see a happy family in the house.”

All of these friends recall their childhoods fondly. But not everyone’s childhood is idyllic. “I avoid my childhood house like the plague,” Danielle said. “When I find myself in my old neighborhood, I drive past the street the way one might drive by a bloody train wreck, wondering if I have the steel to look at it.”

What is it that feeds my obsession with my former home? Is it really that Cape Cod with its dormer windows, its hidden closets in the eaves, its Art Deco touches, that I miss, or is it the people who lived there with me? Is it the sense of safety and happiness I felt there that I long to reclaim?

I am the last survivor of those beloved days. My father died when I was 16 and my grandmother shortly after that. Decades later, my mother passed away. Within two years, my sister followed her. No one who lived in that house with me remains. If I want to remember it, if I don’t want those days to slip away, to blur, to disintegrate, there is no one to rely on but myself.

A friend sent me a link to the house’s property records. I soon learned the names of the current owners.

I found the wife’s name on Facebook and sent off what I hoped was an engaging, disarming message. I included photographs of myself in the house, at various ages, so she would know that my claim was legitimate.

Her reply was amiable, receptive and also startling — she revealed that her husband had found several photographs of my family that had been left behind. I was stunned and intrigued. The photos turned out to be not nearly as exciting as I imagined they would be: a shot of me sitting on our back patio; one of my mother and our cat sunning himself in the front yard; a photo of my sister so close-up that it may well have been the world’s first selfie.

A friend recently sent me a link to a music video for Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me.” I began crying in the opening seconds and continued through the entire song. A young woman revisits her childhood home, wandering room to room and has visions of herself as a young girl, images of her brother and parents. Two lines stick with me: “If I could just come in, I swear I’ll leave/Won’t take nothing but a memory.”

Would a one-time visit satisfy me? No one tags behind Lambert as she explores. If I could commune like that, uninterrupted, would it put my longing to rest? Perhaps. Especially if my family materialized before me as hers does. Is that what I seek? A visit by ghosts? If I said yes, would that mean I was crazy? Or would it only mean I was bereft, lonely and sad deep down to my bones?

I have dreamed about buying that home. My parents paid a mere $20,000 for it in 1955. According to estimates, the house is now worth well over a million. I could probably find a way to afford it, but it would be financially unwise. Still, I have been curious whether there are people who have pulled it off — who have purchased their past.

I posted my question on a local Facebook page and received dozens of responses. Most were just people saying that they, too, had dreamed of doing this. But a few shared experiences that gave me a lot to think about.

Karen had bought her childhood home and lived in it with her family for a year. “It brought me so much happiness when we all sat down to dinner together. … It made me feel so close to my parents. … I thought if it were possible for them to reach out to me, it was definitely going to happen there.”

Kenneth offered a different perspective. He told me that his family still owned his grandparents’ house, a home he had spent much of his childhood in. When he was transferred back to that city, he decided to stay in it. But as he settled down to sleep that first night, he realized something was different. “Although I knew quite well every fiber, brick, and board of the house, something had changed. … I came to the sad realization that home wasn’t home anymore. The warmth that made that house a home was strangely absent now and I knew it. … The heart of that home was those dear people who are no longer there.” The house now stands empty.

I imagine what it would be like to move back into the house on Vernon Street. To pull the covers up to my chin as I lie in my old bedroom, to wake to the remembered spill of sunlight through the windows. Perhaps the experience would draw me closer to those I have lost. And yet their absence might feel even more profound to me within those walls that had once held us all. That what I might be buying was actually a life of regret.

But if someday, on one of my drive-bys, I see a “For Sale” sign in the yard, I am not sure that this realization will have the power to temper me. For now, impossibility keeps me from the quandary of having to decide. And perhaps impossibility is as good a place as any to live out the remainder of my days.

<i>Melanie McCabe is the author of a memoir and three books of poems, most recently “The Night Divers.”</i>

Melanie McCabe

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Illustration by Laura Padilla Castellanos/Washington Post; Courtesy of Melanie McCabe; iStock

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