The Milk Door

I grew up in Connecticut and lived my entire life there until age 68 when I moved to New Mexico. I don't miss Connecticut -- the move here was so right for me. But I do still feel a connection to the state and love reading about places I recognize and knew well.

Mostly I like to browse home decor sites online. New England houses look very different from Santa Fe adobe styles, but it's fun to revisit the old Cape Cod and Colonial decor I used to know. So I search out lifestyle blogs centered specifically in Connecticut. It's fun. It's familiar.

Randomly one day I found this one documenting renovations a young couple was making to a Cape Cod style house they had just bought in 2018. As I surfed the photos and descriptions it began to dawn on me that I recognized everything about it. 

It was the house I grew up in.

The inside, the outside, the view from the living room window of the neighbor's house, the layout she shows in a video where she holds up the floorpans, the funny little stone patio in back, the sloped eaves of my old bedroom, all of it exactly as I remembered although others have lived there over the past 56 years.

Even the milk door was still there. My Dad cut a hole in the kitchen wall to the outside, and put in a two way door. Frenchy, our milkman, would open the little door from the outside, put the bottles (actual glass milk bottles) in there and then my Mom would open the door from inside the kitchen and retrieve the day's delivery. She'd leave the empties in there for him to pick up the next day.

In a video the blogger did about the renovations, she marvels at this odd door to the outside above the kitchen counter and reveals that someone told her about old time milk deliveries and confirmed that this two way door was used for that. (They kept the door even after renovating the kitchen.)

The house is all redone and stylishly modern now, but still recognizable. Milk bottles haven't been placed in the milk door for sixty years or more, but it's still there. I still remember the clink of glass and the smell of buttermilk (my Dad drank a glass of buttermilk with his open face liverwurst sandwiches, so some of my childhood memories are more gag worthy than fond.) 

The blogger stopped posting in 2023 after she had a baby, but the old content is still there, the renovation material mixed in with many posts about recipes and lifestyle and travel. I didn't need to look her up and find the address. I knew. But I did verify her address and yup, it's my old house.

What a weird feeling it was to surf around the internet looking at home furnishings, a little bored and distracted, only to be hit with a blast of recognition and long ago memories. What fun to see how it looks now.