As regular Above the Fold followers (I think there are about nine of you) know, last fall I sold my mother's house, where I spent most of my childhood.
I had decided many years earlier that I simply couldn't see a place for the house in my future life. So, following my mother's death three-and-a-half years ago, I set about the task of emptying it out -- a slow, deliberate process that involved numerous visits to upstate New York and many (many) hours sorting through photos, letters, documents and other possessions of my mother, as well as getting rid of stuff.
When the house was sold, I felt relief and release: Sure, it had been very pleasant to spend a couple of days here and there in the old place, but over time the sense of obligation, of really needing to finish the task, had asserted itself. I also was very happy that the buyers were a couple with a toddler, meaning that another kid would have the pleasure of growing up there.
Yet I discovered I wasn't quite finished with the house.
I had no regrets about selling it, mind you. Rather, sorting through various photos (some of which I hadn't seen before), I found myself thinking about how the place had been such a keystone of our family's life, and how it had changed over the years, much as the family had changed.
My adult children loved going there as kids, so I hit upon the idea of writing for them a "history" of the house, describing some of those changes. Not the authoritative history, to be sure -- I would need my mother for that -- but hopefully at least a useful perspective.
The underlying idea was not just to present construction/renovation-related details about the house, but to give a sense of how my mother and I, as well as other family members and friends who spent time there regularly, occupied the space -- and how doing so reflected our various interests, priorities, even whims, yet also pointed to deeper, profound aspects of our lives.
An example: For most of the nearly five decades that we were in in the house, the "front room" -- that is, the room you entered through the main door -- was a combination mud room and a workspace. But it actually started out as a kind of extra living room, an activity area for me, such as when I had friends over, and it was where we would set up our Christmas tree. So there was definitely a social function to the space -- at first, anyway. As I got older, I preferred spending time in my own room, which was my space, and since that front room tended to be a few degrees cooler than the rest of the first floor during winter, we gravitated more to the living room.
Our side yard offered a perfect space in which to play football, and so after we'd been at the house for a few years, my mother commissioned a pair of size-appropriate wooden goal posts that we installed at either end of the yard, transforming it into a football stadium. I was even able to practice kicking field goals, though sadly this did not lead to real-life success. But the "stadium" had reverted to being a side yard by around my sophomore year of high school, and the goal posts came down some time after that. Still, it was one of the most generous and thoughtful things my mother did for me as a kid.
Far more significant was my mother's decision to transform the portion of the house encompassing the kitchen and dining room, both of which were rather small and, in the case of the latter, always seemed rather dark, no matter the brightness of the day. The wall between the two rooms was removed, creating one large space. Best of all, the combo kitchen/dining area also included a giant picture window with inlaid seat, looking out into the back yard and the woods and meadows beyond; the new lay-out took advantage of southern exposure, making the room bright and warm on sunny days for hours. Mom installed a little wood stove, and brought in her rocking chair, eventually moved in a couch. It was a wonderful place not only to have meals but to sit and read, or chat with visitors, or just gaze out onto the world. I'd say it supplanted the living room as the centerpiece of the house.
I was living on my own by the time that renovation took place, which was several years after Mom had bought the house and part of the property, ending a period of some uncertainty as to whether the owner would continue to let her stay as a tenant. Once she became the owner, Mom was able to remake the house into a place that represented her values and tastes, and her idea of what a home should be. And it ended up being where my wife and I got married, the ceremony taking place right near one of the end zones of my former football field.
The house encompassed far more than that, though. There also was the landscape around us: the creek nearby, which my dog and I explored on our very first day at the house; the adjacent cow pasture, which for the first several years we were there was home to a herd of Black Angus; the hills a short distance away where we had sledding parties in the winter; the barn -- long since torn down -- across the road where my friends and I played, and where as a teenager I hauled hay bales as a summer job. All that is part of the history, too.
I gave an edited version of this history -- minus some of the more personal, familial details -- to the house's new tenants, so they could get a little sense of who, and what, had come before them. Regrettably, I told them, thus far I haven't been able to find anything about the house and its residents before the period my mother and I lived there. I'll keep looking.
Not surprisingly, I'm now contemplating what it could be like to write a similar history of the home where I've been living now for nearly 35 years. Sadly, like the one for my childhood home, it would miss a crucial voice -- that of my wife, who died a few months after my mother. There would be a lot of things to recount, failures as well as successes, because it's a different house with a different set of circumstances.
As in my childhood home, some parts of our house assumed different roles as our family life changed. What we originally called "the family room" contained a lot of our kids' playthings, but it was also a room for general socializing (and watching TV). A few years later, we installed our first home computer there, and as my wife became an avid user, and as our kids grew older and later found spaces of their own, over time the family room essentially became her office, and a means to pursue her various, and in some cases long-neglected, interests.
Similarly, the "front room" -- our nominal living room -- gradually transmogrified into my office, especially after we got a second computer, as well as the place where I'd practice music. It was in that room where, some 17 months after creating a new Word document to externalize a flash of inspiration I'd had on the Mass Pike, I hit "Save," paused and thought, "I think I'm finished." Not quite, as it turned out, but five years later that Word file would turn into this.
I don't envision starting on this history just yet, mainly because right now there's too much of the house's present and future to consider. But I feel that, eventually, it's worth doing. Homes are more than bricks and mortar, lumber and sheetrock. Homes contain people, who all have their individual and collective stories which may not necessarily be compelling or riveting but nonetheless add up to something basic, yet important: "We lived here, and this is what happened."
NEXT
Comments