‘Weird.’ ‘Devastating.’ ‘Liberating.’

Readers share their deep feelings on selling the family home

For most people, the idea of home is fundamental to our identity, to our memories and to our sense of comfort and security. It’s the place where we spend the most formative, if not the majority, of our years. For many, home is a part of who we are, and that’s probably long been the case for humans.

We’ve been living in fabricated dwellings for possibly 10,000 years, certainly since the late Neolithic Age, and we have developed a deep connection with the physical structures we reside in. Art from antiquity and even earlier depicts the homestead and domestic tranquility, and it remains a common subject today (think Norman Rockwell or the staged set of nearly any sitcom). Even our letter “B,” derived from the Phoenician word “beth” meaning “house,” is an evolved pictograph of a small building.

It’s little wonder then that people might get sore when the old family house goes on the market. It can be tough for parents, but even more difficult for the children, who carry the emotional attachments formed by those early years. And the struggle might be affecting more people these days, as increasingly millennials are living at home and extending those connections.

According to a 2012 Pew Research Center report, the share of Americans living in multi-generational-family households (i.e. kids living at home with their parents) is the highest it has been since the 1950s, with adults ages 25 to 34 the most likely to be living in multi-generational households.

But of course losing the family home isn’t just a problem for people in their 20s and 30s. The Sun Journal recently connected with people of diverse ages and backgrounds to get their take on what it was like saying goodbye to the house they grew up in.

‘My home is people . . .’

I lived in my childhood home from age 3 to 23. I loved my house and my neighborhood. I always felt very lucky to grow up where I did. However, when I was 17 and a senior in high school my parents split up. My older brother had just moved out for his freshman year of college and then my dad moved out too. When I left for college the next year I lost my downstairs bedroom, and even though I always came home for breaks and summer the house started feeling less and less like home. By the time my mom put the house on the market in the summer of 2010 I was a year out of college and it had just been my brother and I living in the house for about a year. While it was emotional to see my home for the last two decades get cleaned out, it was also liberating to be able to let go of the bad memories that had been created over the last few years. I also realized that just because our house was being sold it did not change the bond I had with my mom or the relationships with my brothers. One of my favorite quotes is, “My home is people, not places” and I think that especially rings true in my situation.

— Alex Poulin, 28, still of Auburn, is a teacher at Edward Little High School.

A home away from home

My parents sold our “family home” when I was a freshman in high school. After living there for 12 years, it was a part of many of my early childhood memories. That said, many of my memories also came from vacations and traveling, camping, sports and most notably our camp on Thompson Lake in Oxford where we would often stay during the summer. Had we not had our camp or if that was sold, then the feeling of loss or nostalgia would have been greater. In a sense we still have our family home, the “camp,” which is now a year-round finished home where my parents still live. If my parents ever decide to sell I, I’m sure I’ll feel some sense of loss, but ultimately there will be a new place to make memories and call our family home.

— Wes Davis, 29, formerly of Auburn, now of Westbrook, is a partner at Cornerstone Wealth Planning of Auburn.

A sojourn to complete the circle

I grew up in Circleville Ohio, a small farming town, in a neighborhood of ranch houses around a half-dozen cul-de-sacs called Knollwood Village. My parents built our house in 1957, one of the first in the development. We moved in when I was about 3 years old. They sold the house around 1985. It was home for nearly 30 years.

It was located about 3 miles outside of downtown, on the top of a wooded hill amidst cornfields. The area was a mystical, magical paradise for children – miles of space to explore and play and imagine. We lived on bicycles along country roads, often leaving in the morning with a sack lunch and not coming home until dinner. The days were spent picking berries, building fairy houses and forts or wandering the fields or a nearby creek and lake.

Dad died in 1996, and Mom in 2004. Ever since then I have been having dreams set in that neighborhood – I’m biking there, or walking, even flying over it, going up and down the hills in a sled-like cart. Sometimes I am in our old house or the yard. They are all good dreams, but I have wondered why it has been so present in my dream life.

I think it has to do with it having been such a safe and nurturing place for our family as we struggled with some pretty severe medical trauma due to my dad’s Parkinson’s disease. He was diagnosed in 1960 when I was about 6. The early years included three brain surgeries and many absences for rehab and experimental drug treatments. Knollwood Village and the neighbors we had there I think kept us sane in the midst of chaos and held us together as a family.

I am planning a pilgrimage this summer to that place that has been calling me. One woman, whose kids we used to babysit, still lives a few houses down from our old house. She is nearly blind now. I am so grateful that I will be able to stay with her for a couple of nights. The people who now live in our old house will let me visit.

I am not sure what I hope will happen there. I just know that once more I need to see and feel the land – especially the fields and trees. I want to walk and bike there again or simply sit in quiet thought. Maybe I will recover some lost memories. I will take some photos, and maybe do some writing. There will likely be a need for some kind of ritual to thank that place for all it gave us, and then finally, having gone full circle, let it go.

— Klara Tammany, 61, of Auburn, is executive director of The Center for Wisdom’s Women, a drop-in center for women in the B-Street neighborhood of Lewiston.

‘Heartbroken and devastated’

My parents had been toying with the idea of selling my childhood home for years, practically since I graduated from high school. This past December, it finally happened, they sold my house, my home, my childhood . . . or so it seemed. I have not lived in the state of Maine since college, but I was honestly heartbroken and devastated. How could they sell our home??!! I had grown up in that house. From playing Barbies and dress-up, to sleepovers, talking about boys with friends, dinners with my teammates, and experiencing my nephew and niece play and grow as I did.

As our things slowly got packed away into boxes, so did our memories. I got my wish and had one last thanksgiving and one last Christmas in house. I have yet to go back or even drive in my childhood neighborhood. With each visit back to see my family in Maine it becomes a little easier. I’ve had time to process the move and will keep my memories with me always. My parents are happy in their new home. Although I will always consider my childhood house my home, I’ve realized that family makes a home not a building or a house.

— Aly Keene, 30, formerly of Auburn, now of Boston, is a kindergarten teacher at a school for children with autism.

‘Weird’

My old man just sold the house I grew up in and has to be out by April 5. This feels REALLY weird . . .

— Luke Livingston, 30, formerly of Auburn, now of South Portland, is founder and president of Baxter Brewing Co. of Lewiston.

Life on a Waterford farm

The house I grew up in in the 1950s and ’60s was (originally) a girls’ seminary built in the 1700s. I believe it was called the Douglas Seminary. It had three stories, a barn and an ell — a covered area between house and barn. My father took off the top story. Once, all the windows from that story were (leaning) against the building after the top floor was taken down, and my brother, who was probably 11 years old, and another boy broke them all.

In the shed were two outhouses. Out by the barn was an old sycamore tree that was planted in the 1700s, probably brought there by horse and buggy. The Sycamore tree is still there and had been registered as the biggest Sycamore in Maine. The leaves on it were so big somebody had made a candy dish for Mother out of one.

Out back of our house was a building where they had kept beehives. We converted it into a place for me and my cousins to sleep in the summer. Our yard sloped down to the barn. When I was 6 or 7, I got on a tractor and pushed in the clutch. The tractor hit the center post of the barn. The roof didn’t fall in, but I bet my parents instantly aged a few more years!

When my parents sold the house, I thought at the time it might have made a good bed and breakfast, but was glad somebody bought it. I am the only one of my family alive today that lived there. If the current owners see me there, I will be admiring the old tree and remembering the past.

— Tom Fillebrown, 66, still lives in Waterford and is retired.