In the summer of 2013, a man knocked on the door of my house. He’d grown up within its walls. He was in his late eighties and he wanted to look around. He remembered his neighbours, which bedroom had been his and where his brothers had slept.

The house is old. It must have had many occupants. Maybe more will come knocking, bringing their memories and taking some away.

My uncle did that once. He knocked on the door of the house in Perth Ontario where he was born. When the lady who lived there answered he told her he’d been born on the kitchen table and could he come in? And, as people in small towns are wont to do, she said yes.

I, too, have driven by the house I lived in when my first child was born. Although I didn’t knock on the door, I parked out front with my engine idling until the woman who lived there came across the lawn and asked what I was doing. When I said I’d lived in the house and that it was, in fact, the first house I’d ever owned she proceeded to tell me her life story.

And so it goes … people invest themselves in their homes. Door frames are ruled with children’s growth spurts. Dank basement corners hold memories of hide and seek or buckets of frogs’ eggs brought back from the creek. Creaking staircases bring back the fear of discovery when trying to sneak in after curfew. Grates that erupt with volcanoes of hot air from basement furnaces conjure the smell of wet mittens and drying wool.

The houses I’ve lived in are like beads on a string. Each one has a colour, a shape, a texture. Together they are a beautiful necklace, a talisman of places, voices, people, pets, dinners at the dining room table on Sunday afternoons, Saturday mornings polishing brass, summer days running through sprinklers, fall evenings eating peeled apples in ceramic bowls on the front steps.

Everyone has memories of where they lived precisely because life is bundled up in bricks and mortar, wood and stone, glass and shingle. In this column, I would like to celebrate our homes, our lives and our memories. Come along and join me for the ride.