"Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May"

“Isn’t it amazing the memories that are triggered when you go back?”

That’s what one friend wrote on Facebook after I posted a photo of my childhood home in Lexington, Va. My family didn’t live at 23 University Place long (1960 – 1962), but it was long enough to pack in some pivotal pre-adolescent memories.

We lived at the end of a row of seven faculty houses. There were no streets to cross, no fences to fence off neighbors, and there were lots of kids. Best of all, my best friend lives just four houses away. The store with actual penny candy was even closer.

Our houses looked up a sloping hill – our communal playground – to Washington and Lee’s gorgeous Greek Rival campus.

My father never had such an easy – and pretty – commute.

The expansive “front yard” provided one big and safe playground for our games, real and imagined.

The best part of the house:  the front porch. Orson Welles gave Charles Foster Kane a sled. My “Rosebud” was the porch swing.

Years later, of our home in Arlington, Va., my husband would say that, “We bought a porch with a house attached.”

One of our early purchases in Arlington, in between diaper runs, was a porch swing. It’s where I swung infants. It’s where my husband had his “total honesty” porch chats with our girls. It’s where we entertained neighbors on Friday nights for end-of-week cocktails. And it's where I posed for my Google profile photo.

This week on a trip with our younger daughter to Washington, DC, to see friends and Major League Baseball (Go Nationals!) I saw my childhood home and our daughters' childhood home on successive days. The similarities are uncanny. The house my husband and I purchased one quarter of a century after my family left Lexington is a close relative to what is now Washington and Lee's Office of Financial Aid.

Was the 1987 purchase decision location, location, location as the real estate folks say? Or was it the porch and my desire to provide warm and nurturing experiences for our family?

My husband is right. It was the porch. The Arlington house with its porch and swing would be our home for 26 years. My hope is that it brought our daughters their own “Rosebud” memories.

Both houses are full of rosebuds for me.