“The feeling of walking back into my childhood home after 30 years away”

The door sighs open—old hinges remember  
The trembling weight of winters once endured,  
And dust, in gentle motes, reclaims December  
In beams of light my memory assured.  

The wallpaper now faded, sun-bleached gold,  
Still frames the kitchen where I learned to stand,  
And there—beneath the archway, cracked and old—  
My height preserved on molding and by hand.  

The floorboards murmur stories as I tread,  
Each creak a syllable from years before;  
I glimpse the past: bright laughter overhead,  
The silent shoes, the jacket by the door.  

The scent—a mingling of pine and dust and bread—  
Reminds me how the days would stretch and spill;  
My mother’s garden, wild and over-spread,  
Still guards the window ledge, resilient, still.  

A tapestry of echoes all around:  
A sticker, half-peeled, stuck behind a rail;  
My father’s chair, its cushion now sun-browned,  
A letter found, a secret, small and pale.  

Yet even as nostalgia aches and swells,  
And tears are caught in sunlight’s moving dome,  
I stand—an interloper, sharp—then, felled  
By love, for in these walls I am still home.

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