Recently my sister Kelley sent me the online listing of our childhood home. I instantly clicked! To my surprise, the house had not really been updated from its original construction in 1982. I was expecting either a total remodel or a house on its last leg, sadly like many in the neighborhood now. But, when I scrolled through the photos, I was pleasantly surprised to see how the house was cared for and loved. Despite its dated aesthetics, the house stands proudly at the top of the cul-de-sac having weathered many storms and trends.  

I was rapidly flooded with nostalgia and memories. Much to my mother’s dismay, my dad bought the house sight unseen, with barely anything else but the framing up. The builder lived next door and had already constructed two other houses on the block, one in which he and his family lived. I guess my dad thought that was a pretty good endorsement, but Mom was not so sure. Over the next months, we visited the site many times to see the progress and to my five-year-old eyes, it was a mansion. In reality, it was a four-bedroom house in a middle-class suburb outside of Denver.

As my sister and I looked online together while talking on the phone, we clicked through the pictures, room by room and recounted some of the best stories of that house. We talked about our kitchen, where the phone used to hang, the sounds of our dog chasing her ball down the split stairs, hiding places in the basement, compared our closets, agreed our bathroom was too small for two growing girls, admired the maturity of the trees Dad planted, and mostly remembered a time when things weren’t so complex. Our father still alive, our mother without dementia, our beloved family dog, Buff, vibrant with life and a preference for peeing on the parquet.  

The house being the nucleus of my existence offered a place that gave me shelter, of course… but it was also the background to every important memory without getting any credit. The block was my community, my neighbors beautifully diverse in a world without mandates to be so. Conflicts happened and were resolved, there was both subtle and obvious competition whether in the form of Halloween decorations or kickball, which often felt like a fight to the death for this youngest girl on the block who had to keep up.

I did not know how special Yukon Court was until I moved from Colorado to  Oklahoma. It was a perfectly nice suburb and a perfectly nice house, but my sense of community was ripped out from under me. It could have been my age, location, or one of a thousand other factors, but I never did have a sense of communal life like that…until the internet.

It's very popular and easy to pick on the internet and social media. But, when I think of the vast connections and the information flow that would never be in existence, it would be a huge loss for humanity. It’s easy to want to rage against the persistent issues the media likes to make sure we hear around every corner.

When I think about all the people who didn’t have a Yukon Court, a block that raised them, a house that built them, I really think about all the kids who came up in a time when they didn’t have anyone looking out for them. These kids might not have had people to talk to, they might not have connected with someone who loved what they loved, and maybe they didn’t have anyone’s door to knock on in an emergency. The internet became that for many.

Much like my dad, I jumped online with blind faith. I was able to build community, witness differing opinions, see conflict and resolution (kind of rare right now), participate in competition and even connect with my old neighbors from Yukon Court.  

If I think of this current phase of my life, even though there are certainly things that need to be improved, the internet and social media is a significant player in the background of my life…and I’d venture to say yours too.

I told my sister while the house is empty and still on the market, she needs to hop the fence and take a photograph of our handprints in the cement when we built the patio. I hope I get that photo soon, so I can quite literally add it to my digital footprint.

Do me a favor? Talk to some friends about your first social network or blog site, or how you used to update your song on MySpace when you were in a mood. Take a cruise down memory lane—you’ll see there’s a lot more good than not.

This is the house that’s building many, so it’s important we celebrate her too.

Be good…online and in real life.

Jennie

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