The best thing that ever happened to me in my life happened on the front steps of a little two-bedroom house on Walnut Street. I was leaving the garage after having just finished a rehearsal with my then all consuming rock band. The woman who in three short months would be my wife was leaving the house the garage belonged to. I saw her as she was leaving house, at the top of the stairs. She was looking at me when I noticed her. Our first conversation had taken place there, on the top of the stairs. I had a horrible beard at the time. 
      We would sit on the floor in her bedroom in that house and get drunk, smoke cigarettes, and learn all about each other. It is one of the big big stops on the Official Life and Landmarks of Benjamin Philips World Bus Tour. Our association with that house ended badly, and when we left that town forever it was in a hurried, stealing away in the night kind of fashion.
      That was almost seven years ago, and last weekend while on the a two and a half hour long drive home from her parents house, we decided to drive by the old place, literally traveling right down memory lane. We were surprised when we got there and found it be vacant, and I couldn't help but get out and look in the windows. I assumed it would be different than I remembered. Smaller. Distorted and made cartoonish by the spans of time. But it wasn't. It was EXACTLY as I remembered it. I waded through bushes and weeds and peered in through all the windows. She came up behind me, and we looked together, retold old stories, and relived old times. We walked in to the sun porch out in front, the only room we could get into, and it smelled like it had back then. Or maybe it didn't, but we wanted it to.
      We walked around back and up onto the deck, surveying the yard and the driveway. I recalled a birthday party that had been thrown there, how we had gotten a keg of beer for six people, and how we drank on it for weeks untill it was stale and foamy, but I didn't say anything aloud. I went back down and started walkng across the driveway towards the parked car. Everything felt old and fimilar. We had both spent a lot of time hanging around in that house. Three of my friends had rented it at one time or another. Our new car perched oddly in the driveway as if had been transported in from the future.
     She called to me, and I turned and saw her there at the top of the stairs. It was still for a minute. Then said we should go, and we got back in the car and drove to the Dairy Queen.