Miranda Lambert's new song "The House That Built Me" creeps up on you slowly. It's pretty enough, with its simple acoustic guitars and Miranda's bittersweet interpretation, but it's not a "reaction record" as they like to say in the radio business - meaning the phones don't necessarily light up after the first few times it plays.

"The House That Built Me" is one of those songs you notice after you've dropped off the kids and you're sitting at a light in your car, wondering how you got to this frazzled place in your life; it's the melody that you can't get out of your head when, once again, you've had a fight with your husband that leaves you wanting to leave - and go back to the beginning. It's about longing for a "do-over", which is an idea we should have never outgrown.

These days, most of us have many houses that build us; we tend to move around more than the rural character depicted in Miranda's song. In my case, those addresses were primarily in suburban Virginia and Florida, where I built forts in the trees and painted my bedroom walls purple. The house that my childhood heart calls home, however, is a metal-roof farmhouse in the North Carolina foothills where I spent summers helping my peach-faced Aunt Fern can corn and dancing barefoot on the porch with my pretty cousins, dodging the flystrips.

Where is the house that built you? And would the child that lived there recognize you? I'd like to think that the girl in the purple bedroom or the one sitting on the rusty glider eating green apples would know me and - aside from being disappointed that my upper arms resemble mudflaps - would be okay with the woman she's become.

Posted: Friday, May 21 2010 at 10:43 AM

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