No matter how many other owners this little green house may have, it will always be my home.
I read this essay by Derek Petty recently about a yellow house that means so much to him and instantly knew I’d be writing about the green house that still houses my own childhood memories. I hope you’ll take time to read them both today, and then maybe share your own story about a special house in the comments.
Imagine buying a house two doors down from the one you grew up in. That’s what Mom experienced after my parents divorced. She spotted the modest, 1,260-square-foot green house and had to have it. We moved in shortly thereafter, and it became a home in so many ways. I felt safe there.
It’s where my mom, sister and I sat and watched sitcoms on Sunday nights, eating popcorn from the hot air popper, laughing as Flo told Mel to kiss her grits.
It’s where I fell in love with music while lying on my back in my small bedroom, cranking Aerosmith’s Live Bootleg! on my record player with the detachable speakers shoved up to my ears. As I got older, Olivia Newton John’s “Totally Hot” album cover caught my attention. Enough said. I bought a copy at Kmart and listened to every song over and over. I can still recite the heartbreaking words from “Boats Against the Current” on that album – an anthem about a couple that was on different paths.
Summer nights in that house were filled with Kansas City Royals baseball games on my radio in my room as I listened to the crackling signal from 960-KMA in nearby Shenandoah, Iowa. I cheered, jeered, and all points in between.
Not all memories in that house were so grand though. I also almost died in it once when I was ten. A tornado watch had been issued. All of a sudden, the front of the house exploded. I ran into the pantry located just off the kitchen and screamed. When the dust settled, Mom found me. The front of the house was gone. We exited through the back and found a neighbor’s car inside our living room. She had pulled into our driveway to turn around and mistakenly hit the gas pedal instead of the brake. At least I got a good story out of it that ended up in Country Living.
Mom was a fixture in that house. She decided not to date while my sister and I were growing up. I could always count on her being there. She cooked dinner each night, read her newspaper, cleaned, listened to AM radio, did the laundry and fixed everything with WD-40 or duct tape. Then we sat down and watched television.
Once my sister and I were adults, Mom got married and moved across town. I ended up back in that house with a roommate. During this period in my life, I started playing guitar and wrote and recorded ten songs in the living room on my portable cassette player. In one of them, my cat, Midnight, meowed during the intro and I left it in. The songs were angsty and talked about a mythical, elusive girl I would never be able to get, which felt like the story of my young life.
A few years later, I heard the gospel for the first time on a television broadcast in that living room and it penetrated my heart. I didn’t know it at the time, but my life would never be the same.
As I look back on all my memories in that 108-year-old house, I’m reminded that my family is not the only one to have built memories there. The kitchen window has someone’s initials (L. B.) carved into the windowsill. Somehow it soothes me to know that somebody else from days gone by called my house a home.
When I pull up the house on Zillow now, I can see a Google image that depicts evidence of life. It has Christmas lights stapled along the gutter line in front and potted plants on the front porch where I used to pretend to play Putt-Putt (the cement had a small chunk taken out of it and I used to try to put the length of the porch across a large crack, hoping to sink the putt). The gigantic bush that used to sit in front of the house is gone now. And a child’s black and pink four-wheeler is parked on the front porch.
Then I see it. The four diamond-shaped windows in the front door are still covered in tinfoil. That was Mom’s doing all those years ago. And the four rectangular metal house numbers I nailed to the front eons ago are still there. Maybe this was our way of carving our initials into the home before we left. And that’s the thing. No matter how many other owners this house may have, it will always be my home.
