My husband and I first saw the house on 38th Avenue in the Outer Richmond in August of 2004, while I was pregnant with our son. The moment we walked through the front door, we fell in love. Within a month we were busily setting up the nursery and landscaping the back yard to take better advantage of the ocean view. Meanwhile, I had transformed one of the three bedrooms into an office, the proverbial room of one’s own, where I was finishing a novel entitled Ocean Beach. I was also teaching in the MFA programs in creative writing at USF and CCAC, attempting to manage the hormonal soup of my altered prenatal brain while struggling through the academic piecework that is an adjunct’s bread-and-butter. (Scroll down to watch Madness playing “Our House.”

Our son came along in December. Months of maternal bliss, confusion, and uncertainty ensued; in that state of perpetual exhaustion I barely had time to worry about my manuscript, which was making the rounds of the publishers, one rejection at a time. A few months later, my agent called to tell me that an editor at Bantam had made an offer. My husband and I must have shared a glass of champagne or something to celebrate, or maybe I bought a pair of red shoes. The details, you know. That was 2005.

Our son turned one before we’d even had a chance to fully enjoy having a baby around, and then suddenly he turned two, and then three, and at some point, just like Grace Paley, we realized we’d never invited the Bertrams over for dinner. Which is to say everything moved blindingly fast. We found a school within walking distance of our house, a small, homey place where the children go for frequent hikes in Lincoln Park and picnic on the lawn at the Legion of Honor, which my son insists, to this day, on calling The Legion of Bono. He has his priorities. I understand.

In 2007, the novel-formerly-known-as-Ocean-Beach was published as The Year of Fog. It turned out to be my lucky break, the book that made writing my living instead of just my guilty pleasure. Then it was 2008. I kept writing. My baby kept getting bigger. The Bertrams finally came to dinner, although it’s unlikely we ever managed to serve them anything other than pizza from Victoria’s or pork dumplings from Shanghai Dumpling King. The cooking, you know. Then it was 2009, and my husband started working in Palo Alto.

And now here we are, 2010, and we’re moving out of the house on 38th Avenue to be closer to my husband’s office, so that my son and I can see him more often. In the house we just purchased, I’ll have a new “room of one’s own,” and though it’s a very nice room, I know I’ll miss the old one. Our son is on his way to Kindergarten in the fall, having advanced long ago from the sweet baby cries that filled the early months of our life on 38th Avenue to more philosophical ramblings. “I’m never going to marry a girl when I grow up,” he said the other day in the car, as the final bars of Johnny Cash singing ‘Four Strong Winds’ played on the stereo. Why not, I asked. “Because I would love her so much and then she would leave me, and I would be too sad. So I won’t have a girlfriend or a wife, so I can never be sad.”

Well, I wanted to assure him that no one would ever leave him, but instead I just said, “I bet you’ll change your mind.” Six years from now, he’ll be nearly twelve, possibly on the eve of his first minor heartbreak (although I remember clearly that, when I had my heart broken at twelve, it didn’t feel minor at all). Six years from that, if all goes according to schedule, he’ll be leaving home–maybe the house we just moved into, maybe another one altogether–but he’ll be leaving.

I’m not sure what I set out to say. I think it was something about how it’s impossible for me to believe that six years have passed since we took up residence in our house on 38th Avenue, more impossible still to believe that five years have passed since we brought our infant son home and laid him in the bassinet beside our bed, so startled by him, and so in love with him, that I dared not take my hand off of his chest in the night, for fear that he might stop breathing. It’s hard to believe that in the span of six years I went from being in my early thirties–which is a time of life when one still feels relatively young–to being in my late thirties, which is a different ballgame all together.

Go here to view the wonderful old “Our House” video by Madness.

Much to my surprise, day by day the nostalgia for the house we are leaving grows, rather than dissipates. But maybe what I’ll miss isn’t so much the house itself as the things the house represents: the realization of my dreams as a writer, for one thing, but more importantly, the beginning of parenthood: those months at the end of pregnancy when my husband and I would lie side by side in bed with the sound of the waves at our ear, his hand on my belly, thrilled and terrified at the knowledge that we would soon go from two to three, that we would cease to be “a couple” in conventional terms and would suddenly be “a family.” We had been together for ten years by then, a decade during which youth and freedom seemed to have a sort of glimmering permanence, a decade when our deepest responsibilities were to each other and to our respective careers. The moment our son was born, of course, our life underwent a seismic shift.

When we brought our son through the front door for the first time, looked down into his uncomprehending face, and said, “We’re home,” the house, too, underwent a transformation–not in terms of its physical presence in the world, but in terms of our perception. I now understand why, on moving day in 1983, my mother stood in the front yard of the little brick house on Epson Downs Street in Theodore, Alabama, where she had been raising her three daughters for a decade, and cried. And I know why, twenty-eight years later, she can’t bring herself to drive by that place. In some significant way, the little house on Epson Downs Street will always be our family home, as much a part of her memories as the day we were born; but to actually see the place as it is now–someone else’s curtains in the windows, someone else’s car in the driveway–would constitute a rent in the seam, an unpleasant and altogether unnecessary fracturing of time. If she does not drive by it, the place can always be ours: there’s me at 12, standing on the porch, having just been kissed by a stocky boy named Brett, en route to my first alarming heartbreak, and there’s my little sister at five, sitting in her bathing suit atop the pump-house, making rainbows with the garden hose, and there’s my older sister in her pale blue Azalea Trail dress that she’ll wear in the Macy’s Day parade, and there’s my father, to whom my mother is still married, cleaning the Doughboy pool. I sometimes wonder if my most beloved childhood toy still haunts the back yard–a cloth doll named Jennifer who endured years of affection before her enormous plastic head finally fell off and I buried her in a shoe box inscribed with the words, “Herein lies Jennifer, who was a good doll.”

And herein lies the mystery of houses: once a family has moved on and new paint has been applied to the walls, different furniture brought in, different pictures placed on the mantle, the house is summarily changed. The bones may still be the same–the walls and floors and beams all in their rightful places–but the house, nonetheless, has undergone a major transformation. The personality of a house lies, in large part, in its architecture, of course, in the placement of its windows and walls and doors, the quality of its construction. But in deeper measure a house is the sum of its occupants, which is one reason you can never go home again–not entirely, anyway. When I heard a young girl banging at the door last year, calling, “Hello! Hello! Can I come in? I used to live here!” I was reluctant to let her in, reluctant to be the one to rent the seam of her memories. Heraclitus said you can never step in the same river twice, and I think it must be the same way with houses. You can never step in the same house twice. With each new family, each new set of lives, it is a different place entirely.