My parents sold my childhood home last year when my dad retired, and built a new house near us that they have finally moved into. It’s gorgeous. Simply beautiful, and state of the art. I dream of some day having such a home for my family.

But…

We slept over there for the first time on Sunday night, and it was weird to wake up in a room in my parent’s house that was not MY room. It wasn’t my furniture that I grew up with or my bathroom or my view from the window. It wasn’t my old school-age belongings in the closet or my old books on the bookcase or my old stereo next to the bed. It wasn’t my old creaky ceiling fan. It wasn’t my walls that I drew on with crayon or my bent up blinds in the window or my scratched up door or anything even remotely familiar. Not even a candy wrapper under the bed to call my own.

In short, their new house holds no memories for me yet.

That will change, beginning as we all gather around this Thanksgiving and perhaps start some new traditions. But it got me thinking about how different my reaction was from the reaction I had when we moved into that home where I spent a majority of my growing up years.

I remember the first time I ever saw that house. My parents were house hunting, though I didn’t know it then. We used to drive around neighborhoods, and we kept coming back to one street where two majestic Spanish-style houses stood side by side, with nothing else but empty lots in either direction. I don’t know if it was true, but at the time I thought they were the only two-story homes in our tiny retirement town. I remember thinking one would have to be very rich indeed to live in such a grand palace. Because to me, they seemed palatial.

Fast forward to the day my parents informed my sister and me, around 6 and 8 at the time, that we would be moving. They insisted we had seen the new house, but I didn’t know which one they meant and we never drove past it again until the day we moved in. Imagine the utter shock and giddy delight and pure joy of a third-grader who realizes that she is about to move into her dream home and live out the life of a princess. I over-exaggerate the scale of the house now, but that’s really how I felt then. It’s probably the closest I ever came to having my jaw literally drag on the floor. It was also the first time I truly realized that my father’s profession as a physician made us better off financially than most of my friends. Something I ever after tried to be sensitive to.

I remember being positively ecstatic to get, as the oldest child, the room on the back of the house with a view. I’ll never forget falling asleep that first night, looking out at the twinkling lights of the town across the river, for our new home sat right on the water. In fact, I probably didn’t sleep much at all that night. (This is the same room, incidentally, whose strategic location allowed me to sneak out undiscovered that one time in high school, and was also the scene of the great candy wrapper crime.)

I remember lots of other great things about that house. I remember my sister and I sliding down the banister, carving grooves into the wood from the buttons on our jeans. Our mother knew the truth even though we denied it. She was not amused.

I remember that my sister and I had our own playroom, until our baby sister came along a couple of years later and it was converted into her room. We forgave her. I think. Well, maybe I didn’t forgive her so much as I accidentally dropped her on her head once. Same thing. We were even after that.

I remember my mother telling us to let my dad know dinner was ready. We’d always yell up the stairs to him at the top of our lungs, and she’d always say, exasperated, “I could have done that.” It took us leaving for college before they wised up and got an intercom.

I remember getting into huge trouble for drawing on the concrete floor of the back porch with some type of permanent markers, and years later rediscovering the “art” when the Astroturf that had been put down to hide it was ripped up to make way for tile.

I remember how when I fought with my sister, my mother would send us both outside—one to the front yard and the other to the back yard. But we always outsmarted her in our sneakiness. We’d meet up on the side of the house to compare notes over how mean she was and plot our revenge. She says now that she always planned it that way on purpose, because at least we were talking instead of fighting. Uh huh, Mom, likely story!

I remember sleepovers and piano lessons and presents piled high in the living room at Christmas. I remember how my mom found an egg in my drawer once because I wanted to see if it would hatch if I took it out of the refrigerator. I remember how my sister cut a hole in the screen on her window so she could wave to the neighbors. I remember being scared at night and sleeping in her room more than my own.

I remember how my parents and our next-door neighbors threw big Thanksgiving shindigs for a while. They started out small and grew each year until they were renting tables and dishes and silverware and setting up picnic-style outside. Everyone brought a dish. It was a tradition until the year it rained, and the dishwasher broke. That was the year we had about 100 people—a lot of dishes to wash by hand. It was also the occasion on which I got my first kiss from a boy. After that, Thanksgiving went back to being a family affair (because of the rain and the broken dishwasher, not because of the kiss, which my parents are probably only learning about for the first time by reading it here).

I remember a sapling of an oak tree that was planted by a family friend in the front yard not long after we moved into that house, and impatiently thinking that by the time it grew large enough to climb, I’d probably have kids old enough to do the climbing for me. That’s true, but now we won’t be back to ascend that particular tree.

Here’s another silly thing I remember. Until the thrill of our new residence obliterated all thought of the house we had just vacated, I recall being sad at leaving the only home I could remember up to that point. I went around taking mental pictures of each room, so that I would always remember them. I wanted to burn them in my brain since I didn’t have an actual camera. And you know what? I do remember them. Yet when my parents moved out of the house last summer that they had called home for nearly 30 years and which I consider my childhood home more than any other, we went around and took real pictures with a real camera (being technologically advanced and all). It turns out I don’t need them. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a memory is worth a thousand pictures.

Here’s the bottom line. No matter what, and no matter where, I’m thankful this Thanksgiving that I have such wonderful memories and that I have a family to share them with. Because after all, home is wherever the people you love are.