“You can’t go home again.” This saying rates as one of the best-known American proverbs. It served as the title of a novel written by Thomas Wolfe and published in 1940, two years after his death.

The words have been on my mind for the last two weeks. Thanks to a delightful surprise invitation from the current owner of the house where I grew up in Watertown, my two sisters and I had the pleasure of going back to a home that I had left way back in 1949.

My parents bought the house in 1938, the year of the great New England hurricane. At ten years of age, I looked out of the windows with awe as old trees were toppled by the fierce winds of that storm.

On the night of my return the street was placid, having survived Hurricane Irene without obvious damage. Entering my old house I felt nostalgic as I went up the brick steps, climbed so many times in my teenage years.

Inside, the house struck me as smaller than I remembered. This seems to be a common experience for people who go back to their childhood home.

And, of course, the furnishings seemed quite different from my family’s.

A sober note: After entering the living room, I immediately saw in mind’s eye my father who lay in an open coffin in that same room. Those were almost the last days of home wakes, and this one still remains traumatic for me.

Our hostess graciously invited us to explore virtually all the other rooms in her house. They included those on the third floor, one of which was my bedroom in my later teenage years. My most vivid memory of that room was awakening late on a Saturday morning to the calls of a couple of high school friends on the sidewalk below. They had just received their college acceptances and were dying to know whether Harvard had taken me in. (It had.)

When we came back down the staircase to the second floor, I looked toward the bedroom, where my father suffered an attack in the middle of the night from his stomach ulcers. His doctor came, and maybe the priest as well; in any case, it was a harrowing crisis. From my then bedroom across the hall, I felt afraid, not knowing what might be happening to my father and to us, his family.

Much happier memories flooded over me and my two sisters when we were invited into the dining room for a magnificent dinner. For many years, my five siblings and I had sat there with our parents. I remember doing so on Sunday noontimes especially, as well as on birthdays, holidays, and other special times. We had been to Mass on those Sundays and I recall my father criticizing the sermons.

A peculiar physical feature of the dining room was invisible during our visit, but we were told it’s still there. Underneath the rug, at the foot of the table there was a buzzer that my mother would press to summon “the maid” from the kitchen.

This detail—by no means unique to our house—recalls a way of life that has disappeared, along with the Sunday dinners and the voices of friends.

The graciousness of our hosts made the entire experience one that my sisters and I will cherish. Thanks to them, we have proven Thomas Wolfe’s axiom wrong. You can go home again and enjoyably, at least when, like me, you have the good luck to be welcomed by the current householders.