My Heart Lives by the Mountain
Hard to pronounce, an hour away from school, and tucked away in a mountain’s embrace on the outskirts of Vienna was my home; a home known to the locals as simply In Schiffeln 55b. It is the homiest home I’ve ever had. It was three floors with a chilly wine Keller under the ground, and a huge sloping backyard that seemed like it belonged in The Secret Garden. I was only six years old and most wouldn’t remember a house from so far back in their childhood, yet this is the house that immediately comes to mind when I think of home.
Though only a year and a half went by in that old house, it experienced more life than it had in hundreds of years. It saw my first bike ride, my first few teeth lost, the first time we saw real snow fall, our first Christmas away from our family in Mexico, and the first time I tried to write a story in English. It heard my brothers and I fighting over Monopoly, it heard us singing Stille Nacht to our parents in one of our many “concerts”, it heard the first sounds of a violin being played by Pato, it heard the excited accounts of learning about vineyards and Amadeus Mozart, and it heard the first coherent ramblings of English, spilling out of our mouths quicker and quicker, nearly replacing our Spanish. It felt the shuddering cries of when our two ducks were taken by a fox, it felt the warmth of happiness when my grandparents visited from Mexico, it felt the cold snow dripping from our boots after sledging in the park down the road, and it felt the melody of laughter reverberating through its walls as both my brothers and I discovered what it was to grow up in a fairy-tale.
It was completely made out of wood, with two terraces and a sweeping staircase leading to the garden. Inside the house was a mahogany refuge from the bitter cold and a kitchen bursting with song and birthdays, with a chorus of enticing smells from my mom’s cooking. The garden outside our kitchen window was littered with stately pine trees standing guard with serious faces and bellies protruding out, and when it snowed they traded in their green prickly coats for silken white capelets. Underground was a world of slugs and nosy moles whose life purpose was digging up our vegetable garden and filling it with holes. Nearby was a small park with towering wooden structures for us to climb on, and a mean elderly couple with a raving dog who shouted at us in garbled German.
We moved the summer of 2007 to a more convenient apartment fifteen minutes away from the school. It was a nice apartment, but we no longer had our own garden to run around in and there were only a few scraggly pines in the front where the little kids above us played Hide-and-Go-Seek. No home, no matter how extravagant or luxurious, could come close to the castle by the mountain, shaped from the threads of Austrian loom weavers.