You Can't Go Home Again

We had rather an odd occurance at the Butcher's House yesterday. Shortly after we got home from church, there was a knock at the door. It turned out to be a woman who had grown up in our house - she was visiting the neighborhood from out of town and wanted to show her husband where she had lived as a child. While we had never met this woman, we did know her parents, the previous owners, slightly from church. We also know several people in the area who grew up with the family. So, of course, the Missus invited this woman to come in.

Well so far, so good. But the woman, on catching a glimpse of the front hall, suddenly turned unfriendly. "Oh, but you've changed everything," she said in what the Missus reported as a cold and surprised voice, "Maybe we'll just look around outside." They only stayed for a minute or two more.

This episode rankles me. I can understand the natural shock of living in a house for nearly twenty years and then coming back to find that it's been changed, but what I can't understand is the surprise and hostility. What in Heaven's name did she expect? It's our house now and naturally we've decorated it in a manner that suits our tastes. And suddenly becoming all huffy in the face of hospitality, especially after having invited oneself in in the first place, is downright rude.

What with one thing and another, I've never been back to any of my childhood homes, or even to the house we sold five years ago out in Reston. If I ever were to go, I would think that the first thing I'd tell myself was to be prepared for the fact of change. The quality of the change - for better or for worse - is a different issue. But even if I detested what somebody else had done to the place, I'd make sure I was well out of view before I had a good rant, cry or snicker about it.

UPDATE: Speaking of house and home, here's a very telling article from this morning's WaPo about the insane market in the Dee Cee area and the dampening effect it is having not just on buyers, but on sellers as well. I know exactly of what this article speaks - we skootched into our house just ahead of the latest pricing spiral, which started about four years ago. If we sold now, we could make a very good profit, but even with that, we certainly couldn't trade up, most probably could not trade sideways and likely would have to move backwards. No, thanks.