A HOME IS REALLY MORE THAN WHERE WE LIVED

I was 40 years old the last time I saw my grandparents’ house, which of course is not the one pictured here. I’ve written before about March 1990, when we gathered in Crestline, Ohio, for my grandmother’s funeral.

My cousin Peter Kindinger said something I have never forgotten, that for all the wonderful memories the nine grandchildren had of that house, the day of the funeral was almost certainly the last time any of us would be there.

He was right, of course, and earlier this month, I set foot in another house (the one pictured here) for the last time.

This was my family’s home from January 1963 on, when we moved from Ohio to Virginia so my dad could take a job at the Pentagon.

I lived there for 12 years, from halfway through eighth grade until early 1975 when I moved out to get married. I’m going on 11 years in Georgia, and the only place I ever lived longer was 16-plus years in our California home.

But whether or not I was living there, that house in Virginia has been at least a small part of my life for more than 58 years, and now that my mother is gone, my younger brother is getting ready to sell it. When we moved there in 1963, living 15 miles outside the District of Columbia was living in the boondocks.

My dad’s colleagues at the Pentagon kidded him about living so far away and asked if there were cows there.

Now Fairfax is considered close in, and there are people commuting to Washington from 75-100 miles away.

When I visited for holidays in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was stunned to see that so much of what I had grown up with what gone, built over with shopping centers and office buildings.

When I came back for two weeks in 2010, another generation of construction had replaced those buildings.

It’s pretty much all urban now.

It makes no sense one way or the other to say I would or wouldn’t want to live there anymore, because my life is very different from what it was back then. I haven’t lived in the D.C. area since I was 32, nearly 40 years ago.

I live in a quiet community and I drive fewer and fewer miles every year. At my peak as a sportswriter, I put more than 30,000 miles a year on my car. Now it’s less than a third that and I’ve been able to drive the same car for nearly 12 years, closing in on 150,000 miles since we bought it new in 2009.

We live an hour south of Atlanta, and lately we go into the city on average about once a month.

In a typical day, I only talk to one other person. It’s almost like the late ’80s in Colorado and Nevada, when I was living alone. I would come home from work and never speak another word or hear another voice until I left for work the next day.

I live in a home that is the nicest place I’ve ever lived. That’s the main reason we moved to Georgia. Our brand-new house here is lovely and has numerous amenities, but our smaller 60-year-old house in La Canada, CA, was valued at more than three times as much as our house here.

I think our Georgia house would probably go for about half as much as my parents’ house.

Location, location, location.

So I spent a little more than an hour in their house and came away with some books, some papers and a few other things.

I’ll almost certainly never set foot in the house again, although there are a few things that still pique my interest. Ironically, I’ve been thinking about how my own children and how they will view my treasured possessions when I die.

I’ve got roughly 200 baseballs — 125 of them autographed and 75 others painted. Other baseball memorabilia is four autographed jerseys (John Elway, Johnny Bench, Tom Seaver and Juan Soto) and four autographed bats (Pete Rose, Juan Soto, Victor Robles and the cast of The Sandlot).

I’ve got hundreds on hundreds of books, music CDs and DVDs. I have wonderful complete collections of classic newspaper comics — Peanuts, Bloom County, Doonesbury, the Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Little Orphan Annie, Pogo — and others that aren’t complete.

I have a Sony Playstation 4 that has never been used, along with the entire virtual reality setup and about three dozen games. Maybe someday.

And I have something else that means a great deal to me but isn’t worth 5 cents — a dozen or so notebooks with photocopies of all the newspaper columns I wrote between 1986 and 2001.

As for my parents’ house, I would still jump at the opportunity to go through the family photo albums from when I was young.

In the end, the memories are what matter most.

They’re the only way you really can go home again.