By Kevin S. Giles

I lived in six houses in the 12 years I spent in public schools, all of them in Deer Lodge, Montana. Each time we moved I left a piece of me behind, less perceptible than the pencil marks on the walls where my mother measured my escalating height. Scattered behind me, like pages ripped from a diary, were memories formed by physical proximity.

They linger in the shape of walls and size of rooms, and the number of rooms, and stairwells and pantries, and dim lights that made it tough to read a textbook at the kitchen table after dinner. Physical spaces frame events and interactions that make us who we are. It’s destiny to find our more mature selves in unfamiliar rooms of the next house.

The Primary Year: Our first house in Deer Lodge, on Cottonwood Avenue, caught fire 40 years after we moved out. The wrecking ball finished what the flames didn’t. We moved into that dilapidated rented house on a winter night. I arrived in the back seat of a 1937 Ford, unbuckled and threaded through the metal legs of four kitchen chairs. My mother assured my father that she wouldn’t move into the house if her life depended on it, or at least until she could give it a proper inspection in daylight.

Memories: Hanging out with friends Earl, Bob and Pat. High school kids stealing my father’s fresh-laundered slacks from our car and driving off as he ran after them. My grandfather, patching the cracked kitchen window with masking tape while the National Guard practiced shooting with tanks on the west side of the valley. With each boom, the cracks grew.

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The Primary Year, Part 2: After six months in the Cottonwood house, we moved into the Holt house on Kohrs Street. Ada and her son moved to Dillon while Ada studied at Western Montana College. The 1959 prison riot occurred while we were living there, and in the midst of it, the local mortician came to the door during the night while my dad was at the prison. My mother thought (wrongly it turned out) that he was making a death notification.

Memories: Cowboys driving herds of cattle past the house, down St. Mary’s Avenue — then a gravel road. Me sitting closer and closer to the television, unaware that I needed glasses. Meeting a new best friend, Dennis, who lived across the alley.

The Elementary Years: After a single school year we moved again, this time into the “Townsley house” on the portion of Montana Avenue below the Hill. We had two bedrooms and a bath, and an unfurnished basement where I mimicked various scenarios we saw on the westerns on television. In my new neighborhood, I made new friends: Gary, Rick, Kay Lynn, among them. I saw the “Wizard of Oz” for the first time in that house and cowered from the witch.

Memories: Convincing my brother we should ride down the hill, in a wagon, over a landslide of big rocks. Watching a neighbor chop heads off chickens with an axe and seeing them fly headless until they dropped. Going to Gary’s house after school where we ate soda crackers and watched cartoons. Buying candy cigarettes at Frank’s Little Store, a neighborhood grocery, to mimic our fathers.

The Formative Years: We returned to the Hill in the winter of 1962, when my folks bought a stucco house at College and Claggett. They borrowed a milk delivery truck to haul furniture. This was the house that became the model for Paul Morrison’s home in my novel Summer of the Black Chevy. This was the house that was most influential in my upbringing, the home I knew the longest, keeping me grounded to all things Deer Lodge. I became a teenager in that house. We lived a block from where I went to school. I spent a good portion of three or four winters at the ice rink there. Dennis and his family moved to a house a few doors up the street. My buddy Fred lived a block away. When I was a freshman in high school I moved to the bedroom in the garage. It was freezing cold in winter, but a space heater helped, and it was a great place for a teenager to hang out.

Memories: I had some accidents: a head-collision on the skating rink, in the dark, and a spill off my bike riding at high speed down Powder House Hill.

The High School Years: We sold the College Avenue house in 1968 and moved to a rented two-story house on Missouri Avenue, two blocks east of the high school. I lived in an attic bedroom. It had a dormer window that looked onto the street. My closet was nothing more than doors that opened into the attic, freezing cold in winter, but the house had some 1940s charm to it. I was a sophomore. The spring of my junior year, our father nearly died from a heart attack on the living room floor. I came to see my parents as mortal, finally grasping that life doesn’t go on forever.

Memories: One of my best friends, Rick, lived across the creek behind our house.

The Graduation Year: In the spring of my senior year in high school, my parents bought the house on the portion of Montana Avenue that’s on the Hill. That house would become their long-term home. I lived there just a short time. Three classmates lived on that block. My good friend Eric lived a block away. I graduated, worked the summer mowing lawns at the schools and helping a local contractor tar roofs.

I left for a residence hall at the University of Montana in the fall. Some years later, Dad died. Mom eventually sold the house. The new owner painted it blue and cut down the mighty pine trees that stood in front of it. The basketball hoop that was so much a part of our family is gone too.

Memories: Gathering on the patio my dad built off the garage. The warmth of the basement, with its built-in bar, and my dad’s handiwork everywhere. Watching him struggle with three heart surgeries that extended his life 19 years. Packing for college. Leaving behind my Deer Lodge life.

And so, the page turns.

I asked my Facebook friends to tell us what “home” means to them. Here are some of their responses:

¶ A safe place where loved ones gather to enjoy life.

¶ Home is not a place…it’s a feeling in your heart!

¶ Home is the people I am able to enjoy between the times when I take my hat off at the door and push my shoes under the bed.

¶ Home is where I want to go when the vacation seems too long.

¶ Home is acceptance and love even when your behavior is unacceptable and you feel unlovable.

¶ A place, situation, or environment, where love, security, happiness, and a feeling of self-esteem and belonging are prevalent.

¶ The place, sometimes emotional, sometimes physical in which I feel most centered.

¶ This sounds old fashioned but ‘home is where the heart is.’

¶ A haven, protection from the storm.

¶ Home is where you unpack your heart.

¶ Home is my happy place where I can love and feel loved.

¶ Home is my homeland and my new land.

¶ A welcome place I can be myself.

¶ Home is where the military sends you.

¶ Home is wherever I am with people that I love who love me.

¶ Home is comfort, safety, love, reunion, pleasure, relaxation; but also projects, work, responsibility, liability.

¶ Home is a sigh.

¶ Home is where my heart and soul are filled with love, peace and memories, aka Montana!

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Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.