A Home of Our Own
As a youngster, my family moved around a lot so we never really had a home of our own. We lived in nice houses, but we always knew that the house wasn’t ours and in time we would move once again. Such is life for a military family.
When I was around eleven years old, my parents began searching for a home to buy. They looked at several places at different locations on Oahu, but they waited to find the house that would be right for us. Eventually they did find the house that would be our home in Kaneohe.
Located upon a hill at the end of a dead-end road, it was a big white two-story house with a panoramic view that spread from Kaneohe Bay to the Koolau Mountain Range. The house was encircled with tropical plants and trees, with a Japanese-style garden in the back.
The whole family was so excited about the thought of having this house as our very own home. On the first day that the house would officially be ours, my parents and I drove out to the house. The three of us walked up the steps to the front door, only for my father to remember that the keys were in the car. He turned to me and told me to run through the garage and into the laundry room and come up the stairs to open the front door, which I did.
As I opened the door, I saw both my parents smiling at each other and enjoying their moment. They were happy, which made me happy. Suddenly my father picked my mother up effortlessly into his arms to carry her through the threshold. He then took his first step into our new home by tripping on the stoop. Both of them came crashing onto the living room carpet, where they laid laughing and laughing.