House and Home

There is something to be said about the death of a loved entity, the memories of someone or something dead will almost always be sanctified. It's like your mind, taken over by sadness, flushes your memories and only retains the positive. The reputation of the said dead increases infinitely. It can’t incriminate itself. At least, this is my experience.

I’ve experienced two key deaths my life, the death of my father, and the death of my first home. Interestingly, one informed the other.

As much as I ache for my father, I ache for my home. Both, in memory, were perfect.

I vividly remember being bullied in elementary school for the size of my house. Kids on the bus asked if I lived in a shack, made jabs asking how six people could possibly fit in that house. From the outside it wasn’t wildly attractive; it was small, and old. However, it was well kept with its little a-frame porch that my dad built; we had our garden beds filled with hydrangeas, a pretty expansive lawn, and, crabgrass or not, it felt like the lawn was almost always green. It charmingly sat at the bottom of two hills on our road. There were times that I hesitated to have my friends over, but then they’d tell me how nice it was to be at my house. They said how it was as if I had built in friends, with my three sisters, and my parents were always looking to feed us.

It is really hard to put into words what this house was like. It is beyond the architecture, the number of bedrooms, or the green of the grass. My parents bought the house in 1990, a year after my oldest sister was born. A quaint, and technically, one bedroom house, built as a vacation house for New York City folk, fostered the greatest years of my life and a love-filled family of six. Our home had a nice-sized living room, for watching the ball drop, and a basement for us to do laundry, store our nonperishables, and for the kids to make crafts and play games. The steps to the basement featured a rather elaborate growth chart that we kept track of everyone’s heights, every year, since we moved in. Our kitchen was small but practical and overflowed into a small dining room, where we cut every birthday cake, with 5 windows and a corner built in china cabinet. The memory of it is still so beautiful.

The dining room was definitely the center of the action. Whether the table acted as a desk for all of us to work on homework, or a place to bake the family carrot cake recipe for thanksgiving, or just to eat dinner, the dining room was the place. On our birthdays, mom would wake up before anyone else, and decorate our dining room, like a little birthday elf. My particular favorite memory is waking up for school to find my Tasmanian devil decorated dining room, with little paper cut outs hung from the ceiling, along with green and yellow streamers, the Tasmanian devil dancing along the edges of the tablecloth, and my brand new purple two-wheeler bike. My first bike that was not a hand me down. My mom would make us a special birthday dinner (mine almost always being corned beef and cabbage, only a week after St, Patrick’s day, bless my family’s heart. After, we would sit together and sing happy birthday and whichever lucky sister would blow out her candles.

From the dining room windows, you could see our little shed attached to my dad’s greatest creation: our swing-set. The furthest boundary of our house was enforced by a fragrant natural fence of lilacs and honeysuckle, and beyond that was a farm field(i.e. the photo above). In the winters, the field was low and a perfect snowy white, and the summers it grew tall and green, giving us a new terrain. We grew up with a seemingly boundless field, catching potato bugs in the corn stalks, playing hide and seek until my dad whistled us in for dinner. We ran from the tractors and the fertilizer planes, sucked on the nectar of the honeysuckle, and helped my mom with the gardens. My street’s kids would be out late playing hide and seek, knocking on all the doors and luring all the competitive kids into the firefly-lit night. The summers spent in my home were beyond whatever beautifully nostalgic childhood movie cliche that you could ever imagine.

Winter would come, naturally, and the yard would blend seamlessly into the field, covered in snow. Our street, being a small and largely forgotten part of town, would stay snowy for a while. The road was silent, with sagging snow canopies up above, and thickly snow-carpeted ground, the perfect environment for a late night family walk. Lit only by the two streetlights on our road, we’d go around our neighborhood together. We’d build a big snowman when we got back, by the light of the porch, come inside and lay our gloves on the radiator to dry, and mom would make us hot chocolate. In the morning, praying for a snow-day, we spent our days building igloos and snow forts. We would cover our porch steps in snow and create a true sled slalom. Our neighbors would come by and challenge us to snowball fights, while my parents (dad also home for a snow day) cuddled up on the couch, watching us through the big window in our living room, listening to us scream and laugh outside.

The bedroom situation was definitely not ideal. My oldest sisters shared the one bedroom with a door while my younger sister and I had bunkbeds in a room whose hallways led to the living room. My adorable parents slept on a king mattress on the floor of a little vaulted ceiling loft. There was one floor length mirror in my sisters’ room and the one closet was in mine. In the mornings we’d get dressed, then head into my sisters’ room to see how we looked. Getting ready for school, we’d fight to get into the one bathroom, and we’d huddle around the sink, brushing our teeth, rushing, not to miss the bus. There was no getting away from each other, even if you tried. The house was tiny, and lovely for that reason.

I would trade almost anything for that, again.

My dad worked a lot, but was home as much as he could be. We would have family game nights, watch t.v together, quality time was the name of the game. Once, there was a summer of blackouts, and we would sit, candlelit on our living room floor playing word games or telling stories together, until we went to sleep. Our home provided everything we need, and nothing that we didn’t. However, to our sad surprise, it was raging with black mold. My dad, sick with cancer for 12 years, was our canary in the coal mine. He was struggling with lung issues, beyond the cancer, that ultimately stemmed back to our air quality in the house. He could no longer live there.

My dad, when my parents moved into the house, built a cottage in the backyard to rent. Upon the news, my dad moved permanently to the cottage, which was free of the mold. We would cook dinner in the house, then bring it out and eat with him. He and my mom would sleep out there in an air mattress, and the kids ruled the house. My parents filtered through their options, needing, so badly, a solution. Ultimately, our community came to the rescue. True (and very beautiful) story.

Being in a small town, everybody knows everybody. My business is your business, fundamentally. For the better, our community got wind of our living situation, banded together, and raised enough support to build us a new house. They promised me my own room, for the first time in my life. We were given house-plans that featured, inconceivably, 2.5 bathrooms. We were given the promise of clean air. We jumped on the offer, graciously and necessarily.

They knocked down our old house, and we cheered.

They build us a new house, while we stood in awe.

We moved in with excitement, and don’t get me wrong, I am forever grateful I was able to live under the same roof as my dad again, but something shifted. We started to do our homework in our bedrooms. We didn’t have to walk passed my mom in the kitchen when we got home. We no longer centered ourselves together, but apart. Our family confined to such a small space, blossomed in a way completely impossible had we grown up in this new larger house. In a house we felt the grass would be greener, we grew apart.

I never would have thought that the source of shame in my young life, my tiny house, would be the greatest gift the universe has ever given me. The small space, the beautiful details, the bumping into each other, the pranks, hearing each other from across the house, never feeling alone, the seemingly endless quality time. My house allowed my to experience my family, and especially my father, in a way so unique to our surroundings. Forced together by the confines of our house, we loved deeper. We made up for the lost years, with the found minutes in our day to day lives. The beauty of my “home” is that it lays garnished and preserved sharply in my memory. It cannot be disputed, it cannot be insulted, because it is only in my mind, and the minds of my family. My love and life lies within my family and the memories we have with one another, of my late father and of my late home.