This was our family home for 57 years. It’s a simple bungalow – three bedrooms, one bathroom, living, dining, eat in kitchen – and it was perfect for us. It sat on a large block that allowed us to grow all of our own vegetables, beautiful trees, a lot of lawn to mow….but it was really nothing special. It looked a lot different over the years – originally clad with sparkly stucco with a bright orange door. Cringe.
It was a house. It kept us warm and dry. It saw happy times and horrible times – just like any other family home. But it’s the only one I’ve ever known.
When my Mother died, my brother bought the house after my Dad moved on. I know he had his reasons, but I always worried about him living with the ghosts of the past – not souls so much as bad memories and energy. We, none of the three of us, had easy childhoods. Our parents were Dutch immigrants that lived through WWII, and that molded them into the people that they were. They were difficult.
Nothing was ever wasted or taken for granted. Their word was law, and when the laws were broken, our punishment was silence. My parents would simply freeze us out. We lived a strict religious life centered around our church and it’s community of fellow Dutch immigrants, in a small town that was not comforting so much as it was controlling. We lived a block away from our church – it’s high A-line roof easily visible from our front window (the higher the roof the closer to God?). But it was simply too much. When we weren’t working or going to school, it was all about the church. All of our friends came from the church community. At times growing up, I felt myself choking on all of it. The hypocrisy was the worst, but I only saw that many years later in hindsight.
I asked my Dad once what hell was. His answer? It’s an absence of love. And yes, from time to time we all took turns living in hell. There isn’t a house big enough to hold in all that pain.
So why did my brother try to live with his family in this house? I still really don’t know. One by one his wife and kids left, he remarried a woman with her own home, and he split his time between being alone in this house, and being with his new wife and their menagerie of rescued animals in her house. It wasn’t working. The burden of this old house weighed heavy on him, both financially (old houses need new roofs, new plumbing, new paint, and on and on and on), and emotionally, but emptying a house of it’s contents, both the “stuff” and the memories is hard. And after 57 years of so many ups and downs, it was almost impossible to let go.
Our home was a house filled with people somewhere on the Asperger spectrum – something that went on and touched subsequent generations – but it was never acknowledged or understood. There were some of us who simply did not know how to be “normal” (whatever the hell that is), and when the three children raised in this house turned 18, we all turned and ran. Fast and far. Visits “home” were not happy trips, they were obligations, and all three of us spent a lot of time and energy being really angry. Really angry with parents who I now believe were really trying to do their best to raise us in this little house.
So, 57 years later, another family will move in. They will renovate and landscape, raise children, celebrate holidays, and hopefully live a better, more stable and happier life than we did.
In spite of all this, I do have some truly beautiful and loving memories of this home, and I cried long and hard when my brother handed over the keys. There was great comfort in knowing where I could always find my brother. It’s just a house, but it was always my home, and someplace where I knew I could find family and solace. But it is no more.
I now have to carry on, trying to make the very best of my life here. We have a lovely house. It’s not yet a home. I’ll keep working on that. For now, it keeps us cool, warm, and dry.
And yes, I am grateful.
Life on a Blue Moon 