I love photos that show my home as it was in my childhood. This photo depicts my best friend Emily (in the huge glasses) and me playing Atari in our living room. Also pictured is my twin sister Jodi and our foster brother Neil. My dad nailed up that paneling himself; my mom painted that lamp in ceramics class; and we bought that chunky wood frame furniture from a vendor at the county fair.

Over the Labor Day weekend, my family and I visited my mom.

She still lives in the house in which I grew up. The house, which used to be our family farm (my parents sold the land off little by little and eventually tore down the barn, so now it's just the house and yard), sits on the corner of two dirt roads in the tiny town of Quincy in southern Michigan.

When my mother, father, older brother, twin sister and I moved into the house in 1978, it wasn't the prettiest thing ever. But we had just moved to Michigan from New Jersey, my parents, who were both in their 30s, had brand-new jobs and money was tight. My dad, who was from the area we had just moved to, knew the people who owned the house, and they were willing to give him a deal on it.

So my dad and his group of city folk moved out to the country.

For weeks, we scrubbed the floors and walls of that house. We painted. My dad nailed up paneling. We scoured auctions and yard sales and found furniture to fill the rooms of that house. We hung family photographs on the blank walls.

We made it a home.

My sister and I began the third grade, my brother the eighth. We made friends and started making memories in our new house and on the acres of land that surrounded it.

So much of my past is wrapped up in that house. It looks different now ... the downstairs bedroom my parents used to share is now a formal dining room. Upstairs, my mother and stepfather share the bedroom that was mine; my daughter and niece stay in the bedroom that used to be my sister's when they stay with my mom and my brother's old room is set aside for my son and nephew to use when they're there.

But if I close my eyes, I can still hear the voices of my friends echoing in the upstairs hallway. I look out the kitchen window at the maple tree that stands right outside it, and I can clearly see my sister tumbling from it and spraining her ankle for the umpteenth time.

In the basement, there are chalk scribbles on the wall. Some are from a 1978 slumber party during which there was a tornado warning, and six little girls huddled in that basement and wrote on the walls to quell their fears. Others are from a 1984 slumber party during which a group of teenage girls celebrated the last day of their eighth-grade year by writing messages to each other.

The most clearly legible chalk graffiti is the name "EMMY F" ... written by my first friend in Michigan, Emily ... who is still my best friend and who I talk to three or four times a week, even though we live nearly 300 miles apart.

In the dining room, we all find it difficult to sit in the chair at the head of the table that was my father's. My 18-year-old daughter, easily the strongest one of the bunch of us and the undisputed apple of my late father's eye, is the one who usually sits in that chair now at family dinners.

I can point out the exact spot on the porch where I had my first kiss. I can tell you where my daughter took her first steps; where my niece was when she spoke her first word.

All those places are in my mother's house.

I'm the kind of person who is adaptable. I can be happy and comfortable just about anywhere.

But there is something about being in my childhood home that brings me such peace.

Who says you can't go home again?