I’ve said this before and I’ll probably say it again, but I think this weekend may have been the worst one of my life.

Sure the blind date in high school where I resorted to asking the question “How’s life?” as a conversation starter was a low one. And the weekend I jumped head first over a 10 foot retaining wall deserves no bragging.

Not to mention the countless amount of Friday nights I stood idly by on the bench and watched my high school football team get slaughtered.

How do you tell someone you weren’t good enough to play for a 2 and 7 football team?

But none of these weekends even holds a candle to this one.

My family was moving. From the Marshalltown I grew up in to a foreign land called Boone.

My attitude was already shaky as I had just watched my ‘Clones, once again, come up one possession short of a huge upset. After the game, I headed home to good old Marshalltown for perhaps the last time.

After a month and a half of dreading, it was finally here. Time for loading trucks, assembly lines, deep cleaning, rearranging, unloading, etc.

Many of you have gone through the same process more than once.

You may ask yourself, why so hard?

You lift a few boxes and you make a few trips.

That’s what I thought too.

Let me set the stage. I’ve been fortunate enough to live in the same house my whole life. I’ve eaten in the same kitchen my whole life, been in the same room my whole life, and slept in the same bed my whole life — except for that short waterbed craze. In this day and age, that doesn’t happen much anymore.

The hard part about moving out of a house you’ve lived in all your life is not the physical part.

Sure it’s the pits to lug boxes up and down stairs, packing and repacking the moving van to make sure every possible item fits and to clean out a junk pile that never seems to get smaller.

But the hard part is the memories that keep getting uncovered in that junk pile.

As I packed up my room, the memories were overwhelming.

I found the only award I ever won for an art picture, my fourth grade sportsmanship football trophy, a box of letters from an old girlfriend, a picture of the fifth grade teacher I had a crush on, and so on and so forth.

When you live in a house for 21 years, countless memories are built up and stored.

Like junk in the attic, they just keep getting piled on top of one another until you can’t even turn around without another memory hitting you in the face. My words won’t even do them justice, but in this world, words are all we have.

There was the time I camped out in my backyard with my buddies, the time I took my little cousins out on the roof, the time my older brother pushed me through the front window, the time we buried my dog in the backyard and accidentally dug him up three years later.

No one really liked that dog anyway.

I remember hanging Christmas lights on the house, scaring trick or treaters with my mom, baseball games in the front yard, football games in the street, snowball fights in the backyard, a homemade hoop hanging from the garage, the tree house in the crab apple tree and the sandbox.

I really didn’t have a sandbox, but these stories always seem to have one, don’t they?

I must have played catch with my dad over a thousand times in that front yard. And I had about the same amount of hiding places.

We wrote our names on walls, carved them in the trees and drew them in the cement.

I remember being sent up the stairs, vacuuming the stairs, falling down the stairs and recarpeting the stairs.

There was hide and go seek, ghosts in the graveyard, flashlight tag and tetherball, my first car, my first date, my first kiss, my first dance and my first broken heart.

The trees were green in the spring and yellow in the fall. My driveway was painted during Homecoming week, and remarkably we were never teepeed.

What a glorious house.

After the packing was over, we sat in the middle of a virtually empty house and ate a pizza. I felt like I was in the middle of a bad “Growing Pains” episode as we recalled many of these memories.

Though we all had something on our minds, there was nothing really left to say. It was just time to go.

As we drove out of Marshalltown, I said good-bye to many things.

Good-bye to the little league field I learned to play baseball on, good-bye to the meat packing plant that made many a morning smell horrible, good-bye to the hill that my family picnicked on every fall, and mostly I said good-bye to the house I grew up in. I couldn’t have asked for a better one.

Unpacking in Boone was a little easier. When I unpacked some boxes in my new room, I realized that the memories were still there.

I still had my art award, sportsmanship award and love letters. Just like me, they had a new house now.

A new house that would, in time, become a home with memories all its own.

I guess memories are truly like junk in an attic. Though they are made in one place, they stay with you forever, wherever you may go.

Jackson Lashier is a junior in English from Marshalltown.