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Thanksgiving for me this year took place in the same home it always does: my own. I have been living at 24 Parish Road in Georgetown for the past ten and a half years. We moved into the house on July 9th, 2001, a mere six days after my sister Alivia was born.

I had never even seen the house before we moved in, so the driveway we arrived in and the brand new place that was going to be home from then on was a scary and exciting experience. I can still remember going around to the back door of the house and climbing up the basement stairs to the big, open kitchen. Up a half-flight of stairs from the kitchen was the enormous, practically empty family room, with a peaked ceiling that even the tallest ladder didn’t seem to be able to touch. The entire house seemed huge, enormous! Certainly more than enough room for a family of seven.

Nowadays, I’ve become quite used to the space. After ten years in the house, what else would one expect? The vast emptiness of the family room is now well-furnished with sofa, loveseat, recliner, and ottoman, and is cluttered with Barbie dolls, Webkinz stuffed animals, Pillow Pets, board games, books of all reading levels, and more DVDs than you could name. The peaked ceiling is still as high as it ever was, and the air above our heads is now the only empty space left in the room.

The room emulates our hold on the house; vast as it once appeared our living in it and spreading our space out has made the house seem much smaller than it originally was. Even so, the house has become home through ten years of living. Our four bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths, messy though they tend to be, absorb the love in the house. If walls could talk, I can only imagine what the walls of our house would say. Though there has been more arguing, fighting, and yelling in our house than one could sum up in words, there has been even more love. Ten Christmas mornings spent with one another, seventy birthdays and the joy that gets wrapped up in each gift, ten Mother’s Days and ten Father’s Days complete with breakfast in bed, ten years of success, failure, and working through troubles as a family.