We Never Lived in a Mansion (But We Sure Thought We Did)

I had a weird ass dream last night that took me back to a house that we lived in when we were kids. It’s the house we moved to after my parents officially divorced. My dad went off to live with his girlfriend and my mom moved us in with her boyfriend. It was a house they were renting from a doctor friend of theirs. 

Everyone once and a while this specific house will pop up in my dreams. Long winding hallways, secret rooms, haunted rooms- you know, normal shit.

Last night I dreamt specifically of the second floor where my brother, sister and I all had rooms. In my dream I was apparently living in the house alone but still in my old bedroom. My sister had the bigger bedroom of the three when we were kids and my dream self decided he wanted to move to that bedroom. (My awake self can’t fathom why I wouldn’t move to the master bedroom which was on the first floor but what are you gonna do?)

As I walked the halls, I looked out to the backyard where the pool beckoned to me to come for a swim.

But then my dream self decided it was too cold out to swim. We’ve been getting cold at night here in Florida so that was probably why my brain came to that conclusion. But then my dream self was cursing the New England weather which makes less sense because the real house was in California and I currently live in Florida.

While I was walking back and forth between rooms, I bumped into a wall that opened up and revealed a bathroom, but it wasn’t a bathroom. It was too skinny and sloped down like there were stairs. But upon closer inspection, they weren’t stairs, it was a slide. A slide into the pool! How had we missed this?!

The dream got weirder from there but I won’t go into detail. Nothing insidious, just weird.

When I woke up, I thought about the house for the first time in a while. We called in the Mansion. That’s how my older sister and I identify which house we’re talking about. There’s the Yellow House, the Blue House, the Mansion, and the Brown House. This is how we refer to all the houses we lived in while in California. 

Funny thing is, that house didn’t have a pool. It didn’t have long winding hallways. It wasn’t a mansion (though it did have an absurdly large garage- I remember my mom and her boyfriend throwing a big halloween party in there at one point). 

Oh!

I did also have a secret room.

I don’t really remember how we discovered it but a shelf in my brother’s room could be moved and it opened up into a giant attic space above the garage. 

Thinking back on it now, it was a weird design flaw. I can’t really imagine what that space could have been for other than an absurd amount of storage. I suppose it could have been built out to be more rooms or an office or a playroom? But then you’d have to go through a bedroom to get to it.

The house also had a built-in vacuum cleaner which has no relevance to this story whatsoever but it just popped into my head.

I low-key wonder what it would be like to go back and see that house now. If I could remember the address, I would 100% stalk it on Zillow. It likely is nothing more than a randomly nice two story house that was so shiny and new that, to our young minds, it was a mansion. It did have a ton of land and horse stables. The neighbors down the street had a large pasture with a bunch of sheep that we’d go and terrorize. 

This was also the house where my brother once caught a tarantula. He put it in an old cage where my pet rat had used to live. He subsequently ripped the thing’s legs off (the tarantula, not the rat. The rat was given away at some point).

This memory rabbit hole is either a great idea or a horrible one. 

I may or may not be stalking old houses whose addresses I do remember right now. You know, because reliving trauma is always fun. Whoever owned my dad’s house in California after he sold it, really let it go to shit. Looks like they changed a ton of the inside too and not for the better. Though a random hutch thing he made can still be seen in one of the photos in the backyard.

I also have zero idea why I felt the need to write this down but here we are.

Also, the concept of a mansion is terrible. I mean, if you have the money to take care of it, good for you. My house is just shy of 1100 square feet and I am failing miserably at keeping it in any sort of order. Granted, I still haven’t fully moved in yet. 

I mean, I live here. My stuff is here. But I’ve yet to get fully settled. There are still boxes everywhere. 

Now I’m trying to find a damn dining room table. 

Aren’t you glad I’m back to blogging?