My parents bought the house when my mother was eight months pregnant with my older sister, in 1984. There was no running water, no staircase to reach the second level. So Mom toddled up ladders and waddled to an outhouse.

She and my father poured their bodies and every penny they could scrape together raising cows and baling hay into making the 120-year-old house habitable.

It was never like the ones you see on TV. Sometimes, I’d wish it looked fancier, with straighter lines and smoother edges, the way a teenage girl wishes her mother was more like her best friend’s cooler mom. But looking back, I’m glad for the handmade screen doors, knowing that my parents built what built me.

That house was more than a home. It’s silly, perhaps, to say that it had a soul. But I’m a silly woman. And I believe that anything you love hard enough can love you back. And we loved that house like family.

When my mother slept through labor during a March snowstorm in 1986, she had no choice but to give birth to me in the upstairs bathroom, with Dad playing the role of doctor the best he could. And with my very first breath, I breathed this house.

How could a girl who loves a place like this — a girl who wedged her Hungry Hungry Hippo marbles between the floorboards as the house wedged itself back into me by way of countless summers of barefoot splinters — ever leave it? If you had asked that girl whether she’d ever become the kind of woman who’d live in six states in her 20s, I’d tell you there are wildest dreams, and then there’s the thought that someone who’s all roots and no leaves could ever blow away from where she’d been planted.

‘Love never ends’

My parents bought me my very first plane ticket for my 21st birthday. It was 2007, and they wanted me to spend spring break in London, visiting my best friend who was studying abroad for a semester. “I want you to see the world,” Mom told me.

I didn’t know that she was dying.

I knew, of course, that she had cancer — again. But I hoped that since we’d beaten it the first time, we could beat it twice.

But then I got the phone call on a rainy Tuesday night six months later. I was a few weeks into the first semester of my senior year at Syracuse University, where my mom refused to allow me to take a semester off, no matter how bleak things looked.

“Come home,” Dad said simply when I picked up the phone.

I didn’t know if Mom could even last the two hours it would take to drive home, but somehow she did. And when I threw myself into our house, I ran up those creaky stairs that had once been nothing more but a ladder.

Mom was in her bed, not 10 feet from the spot where she’d given birth to me. Her eyes were closed, but I knew she could hear me. So I grabbed her hand as I sat down next to her and started spilling out I-love-yous like they were medicine. And I tried not to cry, when I told her it would be OK if she let go.

“Love never ends,” I promised.

There, I held her hand as I felt her leave, taking my heart out of that room, where Mom and I had lived an entire life cycle together, from my first breath to her last. And in the space of a second where her next breath should have been, I felt those deep roots of mine shrivel, until I was nothing but dried-out leaves, desperate for a gust of wind to take me away. Anywhere.

That old house

I have lived in New York, Virginia, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Texas. There were years when I made sure all my possessions could fit easily in a hatchback, knowing the next move was always on the horizon. Somewhere around my sixth move, I stopped hemming my IKEA curtains, as the bottoms grew threadbare, and I decided they’d be better used as cleaning rags.

Altogether, there have been 11 moves since I graduated college not quite 11 years ago. And I tried, at first, to push myself into falling in love with every apartment and rented room. But you can’t fake love when you know what the real thing feels like.

Things were never the same for me at the farm after Mom passed. I would still say “Hello, house,” when I came home to visit Dad for a long weekend. But the house had seen that one final moment with Mom. It had been the only witness to the change in me. The before-and-after. And I felt like it knew when I was pretending or trying too hard to be Before Maggie for everyone else. Even when others would never guess.

In 2015, I moved to Texas. A year later, Dad put the farm up for sale.

The people who bought it are lovely. A young family with a little boy who lives in my old room and draws on those wide-plank floorboards. A dad who raises the same cows I once named Rosie and Violet. A mom who cooks beef stew on the stove I used to hate scrubbing clean on spaghetti night. Whenever my heart hurts at the thought of the home I lost, I think of that new family. How the walls of that house will burrow into their bones, and how its soul will find its way into theirs. I think it already has: They often invite my dad over for dinner, and I wonder if it’s them asking or if it’s just the house that wants to keep seeing him.

Shortly after they moved in, they extended an invitation for me to come over, so I could say goodbye to the house. But I still haven’t taken them up on it. I am paid to write every day, but I’ll never find the words to say goodbye to that home where my heart is.

So my heart has remained homeless.

Until now.

Coming home

My boyfriend, John, and I must have toured 20 houses. They were all too small. Or too expensive. Or needed too much work. Or just didn’t feel right. So our Realtor, Skyler, would put the key back in the lockbox, and we’d drive off to look at another place, our hopes gradually deflating.

Then, one Saturday in January, Skyler turned the key in the lock of a tiny blue cottage in Eastwood, and held the door open for John and me to step inside. And I let the words slip out of my lips before I even knew they’d been waiting there, desperate to be said for years.

“Hello, house,” I whispered.

There was a warmth in the air, the kind I knew. And as I walked along the skinny hardwood floors, I saw the long and happy life John and I could live upon them. One where I could sit and type inside the bay window, the way I’d always scribbled beneath my front-yard tree as a kid. Where, someday, we’d come home with a can of blue or pink paint for the front bedroom. Where we can track how that baby grows in doorframe pencil-etchings.

I wrote the sellers a letter and promised to treat the house the way my first home had always treated me. And in the weeks after our closing, I’d drive over in the afternoons, chirping, “Hello, house!” when I entered for long afternoon sessions of painting and spackling.

Its floors slope, and there are little imperfections you’d never see in a house on TV. But I have learned in this rootless decade of mine to love the things that made my house itself, just as I’ve come to cherish the ways my mom was herself.

I’ve been unpacking thoughtfully, with the knowledge that my things will finally stay in their place for more than a year or two. They will become rooted.

And so will I.

Gordon is a staff writer at the Chronicle. You can email her at maggie.gordon@chron.com or find her on Twitter @MagEGordon.