Goodbye to Reno: Part 1

I've lived in a lot of different places. At 7 years, Reno holds the record for any city, 13 years total if you count all the time my parents have lived there since I left for college. That's by far the longest time that my stuff has been in one place.

Come August, my brother is going away to UC Berkeley and my parents will both be living in Sacramento. I'm here for Benny's graduation and it will be the last time that I call Reno "home," in any sense.

My parents sold the house already and are renting an apartment just until Benny graduates and they can all move to California. I guess that part wasn't as much of a blow for me, since that house hasn't felt like home for a long time now.

Yesterday, I arrived in Reno and saw the temporary apartment for the first time. Ironically, it brought back a lot of memories of the temporary apartment we lived in when we first moved to Reno. Everyone is sleeping on air mattresses and living out of boxes and suitcases. My parents went and borrowed an extra air mattress just for me, and it is by far the nicest of the three. It's queen sized and even has an air-filled headboard. My brother jokingly says that it is too nice for the apartment.

90% of our stuff got moved to Sacramento already, so we are making do without a lot of the usual.  The shower curtains are garbage bags held up by clothes hangers (the kind with the clips that you use for pants). Clothes are hung out to dry on a broom handle out on the balcony. With us in the apartment are all the odds and ends that didn't quite fit in the truck. There's the keyboard I learned to play piano on, a Christmas angel decoration, a wine rack, a shoe rack. For some reason, most of our clocks are still here, making for a really high clocks-per-square-foot ratio. Fitting I guess, since the word for "clock" in Chinese sounds like the word for "ending."  There's a lot of ticking in the living room.  The sound of time passing is actually pretty loud.

Coming back from the restaurant last night, we swung by the old house at Emerald View to have a look. For my mother, it's like an ex she can't let go of. We parked at the cul-de-sac like a car full of stalkers, straining to get a look at the new residents, or see if the house has changed at all in the three weeks since they moved out. "She wants to see if the house misses her at all," cracks Benny.

Since we're in the neighborhood, we step chronologically backwards, stopping by to see all the houses we've lived in. We swing by the house at Timber Ridge, where we lived for a few short months before moving into the larger house at Emerald View. My dad feels a particular attachment to this house because we did all the landscaping ourselves. He admits to the occasional drive-by stalking to see how the shrubbery is doing. My dad laments that they haven't been feeding the bushes properly; they're still puny.

Next is the house at Moonridge Ave, my favorite. I remember it fondly as being cozy and sunny.  The neighborhood was nicely suburban, with a public park practically in the backyard. The front yard was beautifully landscaped.  To the left of the driveway was a brilliantly green lawn.  To the right was a striking design of checkered red bricks glittering white rocks, with giant rosebushes sprouting from some of the checkers. In the backyard were grape and tomato vines, apple and pear trees, as well as more grass for playing. The inside was spacious, or at least it seemed so at the time, having lived in apartments all our lives. The carpet was a cheerful shade of pink.

Sadly, the house has fallen into an awful state of disrepair. When we stopped by, the paint on the house was chipped and mostly worn off in places. The lawn was a patch of dry, packed dirt with the odd tuft of grass. The red and white checkers were completely obscured by weeds and the rosebushes were gnarly 6-foot-tall horrors with thorns. The gate to the backyard was nailed shut with planks. A Christmas decoration hung above the garage, though it was June. It hurt a little bit, but it looked so unlike the house that we had lived in that it almost didn't register.  6346 Moonridge Terrace still exists in my mind, as Photoshop perfect as ever.