Flipping Houses

I love reading, but I'm sure there are plenty of classic novels I haven't read, or read so long ago that I don't remember them well enough.

Preparing to go to my childhood home one final time to clear out any last items left behind, and pay a final visit, before it's sold, the title of Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again" rings in my head. I can't say I've read it. I want to now.

This title, the words of it, have become a motto, a saying and maybe even a cliché, depending on your point of view, since the book was published in 1940.

Historian Susan Matt, who authored "Homesickness: An American History," defines the phrase as a recognition of how nostalgia makes people view the past with a positive bias, but also the phenomenon of being unable to see how time changes places and people—having a locked-in view of how they seemed, frozen in a past moment in time.

For a long while, I was probably locked in to a rosier view of my family's home in central New Jersey, retaining that perception through periodic visits since I started working in New York. In recent years, however, I started to notice the cockeyed electrical outlets that couldn't hold plugs properly anymore, the eroding wooden deck in the backyard, and the general fading and aging.

In her book, Matt challenges and questions the idea that homesickness is just a sign of immaturity, and is seen that way because American society, and also the wider world, value individualism, forward progress and restless movement. Those traits are not necessarily there in human nature and had to be learned though. The pull of home, or the idea of home, is always a strong force.

I've had my own home for several years now, an apartment found in 2008 as a blank, empty slate with bare white walls, and gradually filled with warmth, starting with paint colors I chose and probably too many possessions—but more importantly now, my own family, my wife and daughter.

So it's time to let go of that New Jersey house, accept its disappearance. The buyer is a contractor, who will fix its faults and likely overhaul most of what I remember about it. I won't be there to see that. It's time for others to make memories there, in the same way that I am now doing on my own.