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LJ Idol Week Three: In Another Castle
Mar. 31st, 2014 07:30 pmA woman’s home is her castle.
When I think of “home,” I don’t think of the condo I bought nearly 15 years ago. I dream of the perfect little house.
Two bedrooms, one bath, six closets. A basement, half finished, and an attic with a real fixed staircase. A garage just big enough for a whale of an American-made car.
Shiny varnished woodwork. Maple trees to shade the roof. A backyard hill made for sledding.
My father and mother built that house. One evening, as a thirtysomething man trying to start a family with his wife, my father sketched out the design of the house on a crinkly sheet of tissue paper. The initial sketch became more detailed as he took a ruler and pencil and measured out the walls and doorways just as he had been taught in his high school mechanical-drawing class. Then he and my mother bought a half-acre of land and got the foundation dug. All summer long, the two of them worked 10 hours a day at their factory jobs, grabbed a sandwich for supper, set up a couple of clamp lights, and hammered away until midnight.
My parents brought me home to that house as a newborn. Growing up, I knew every closet by name (front-hall closet, work-clothes closet) as well as by the sound of its door and by its contents (the squeaky canister vacuum cleaner, the musty scent of worn sweaters and pants). The medicine cabinet made a prolonged metallic squeak as my father opened and closed it when he got up at night to take some aspirin. The sheets on the backyard clothesline almost blinded me with their cleanliness in the sunshine.
One evening at the dinner table when I was about seven years old, my mother announced, “We don’t have to pay the rent anymore.” I didn’t know anything about veterans’ mortgages at the time, but I garnered the sense that we had planted deep roots and I would always be able to build cardboard-box houses in the cellar and roll down the back hill with the grass slap-slapping me in the face until the world spun weirdly.
Time passed, and one Sunday morning my father dropped dead in the bathroom he had built, and some years later my mother went into the hospital and never came out. I bought a condo near the big city where I’d always wanted to work and sold the little house in the small town to a single mother who had been born at the hospital near my condo.
My life puttered on until the economy crashed around me. Now I am old and hard to employ, and I worry constantly about paying the mortgage. I know I could not have foreseen the Great Recession and its lasting impact, but some days I bitterly regret not keeping my parents’ house free and clear. At night I close my eyes and still dream about the perfect home, built by my parents’ hands, with hopes and love.
When I think of “home,” I don’t think of the condo I bought nearly 15 years ago. I dream of the perfect little house.
Two bedrooms, one bath, six closets. A basement, half finished, and an attic with a real fixed staircase. A garage just big enough for a whale of an American-made car.
Shiny varnished woodwork. Maple trees to shade the roof. A backyard hill made for sledding.
My father and mother built that house. One evening, as a thirtysomething man trying to start a family with his wife, my father sketched out the design of the house on a crinkly sheet of tissue paper. The initial sketch became more detailed as he took a ruler and pencil and measured out the walls and doorways just as he had been taught in his high school mechanical-drawing class. Then he and my mother bought a half-acre of land and got the foundation dug. All summer long, the two of them worked 10 hours a day at their factory jobs, grabbed a sandwich for supper, set up a couple of clamp lights, and hammered away until midnight.
My parents brought me home to that house as a newborn. Growing up, I knew every closet by name (front-hall closet, work-clothes closet) as well as by the sound of its door and by its contents (the squeaky canister vacuum cleaner, the musty scent of worn sweaters and pants). The medicine cabinet made a prolonged metallic squeak as my father opened and closed it when he got up at night to take some aspirin. The sheets on the backyard clothesline almost blinded me with their cleanliness in the sunshine.
One evening at the dinner table when I was about seven years old, my mother announced, “We don’t have to pay the rent anymore.” I didn’t know anything about veterans’ mortgages at the time, but I garnered the sense that we had planted deep roots and I would always be able to build cardboard-box houses in the cellar and roll down the back hill with the grass slap-slapping me in the face until the world spun weirdly.
Time passed, and one Sunday morning my father dropped dead in the bathroom he had built, and some years later my mother went into the hospital and never came out. I bought a condo near the big city where I’d always wanted to work and sold the little house in the small town to a single mother who had been born at the hospital near my condo.
My life puttered on until the economy crashed around me. Now I am old and hard to employ, and I worry constantly about paying the mortgage. I know I could not have foreseen the Great Recession and its lasting impact, but some days I bitterly regret not keeping my parents’ house free and clear. At night I close my eyes and still dream about the perfect home, built by my parents’ hands, with hopes and love.
