The Family Home – Part Three
We moved into our new, old house at 1362 Pine St. the first of July. I felt roomy with the big windows all around the front of the house. These windows also made it easy to keep an eye on the kids as they played in the front yard. The kitchen was the old fashioned kind with a space off to one side for a little table and a room off the back with cabinets and a door that led into the back yard via the driveway. The stairs leading to a large finished attic were in the back room, also. The dining room had a beautiful built-in corner cabinet with glass doors and a big, arched opening into the living room.
We managed to fit our king size water bed in the master bedroom, which was only slightly bigger than the other two rooms but had a back door leading out onto an enclosed patio which had been added on to the house at some point. We set Josh up in the back bedroom with his little twin bed and a dresser with a mirror. Missy was in the front bedroom with her crib and a dresser.
The house was entirely furnished with hand-me-downs but that didn’t bother us. With Don having two older brothers and me being the youngest of four girls, hand-me-downs had been a way of life forever. In fact, we were grateful for the generosity of others and the faithfulness of God to provide for our needs.
It was a bit of an adjustment for Josh and Missy to have separate rooms. They loved to be together and Josh was teaching Missy how to talk by telling her to say this or that all day long. With a nightly routine of Looney Tunes and a bowl of cereal for a bedtime snack they were settled in to their own bedrooms before long.
We grew to really appreciate the doors which could close off the front of the house from the back. Don was working shift work at the time and so he often had to sleep in the daytime. By closing the hall doors he was able to get his rest and not be disturbed by the noisy antics of our growing children.
Soon after we got settled in, a new family was moving into our old house. John and Diane moved in with their little boy, Jeremy, who was just a couple of months older than Josh. Diane was pregnant and due to have her new baby very soon. I went out to welcome our new neighbors on moving day and Josh was with me as we visited in the driveway. He and Jeremy struck up an immediate friendship and were thick as thieves from that day on.
Diane had their new baby boy, Ryan, soon after they got settled. She was also a stay at home mom and so we enjoyed lots of fun and laughter and mutual support as we spent our days raising our babies on Pine St. But our children were not the only kids on the block. Giorgi and Alexei lived on the other side of John and Diane and were the same age as Josh and Missy. These kids would play together from morning till night, especially in the summer.
An elderly couple lived next door to us on the other side. Rose was kind and active in the community. Russell was a typical gruff old Italian with a kind heart. He used to invite Josh and Missy to come pick the strawberries he had growing in his courtyard when they got ripe. He had some star jasmine growing near the strawberries and it was always in bloom when the berries were ripe. One time when Missy was little, we were walking past some jasmine in bloom and she said, “Mommy, it smells like strawberries!” She still associates the smell of jasmine with ripe strawberries to this day.
Russell and Rose passed away within a week of each other. One of their sons moved into the house for a while with his wife and baby daughter. When the house was sold to settle the estate another young family moved on to Pine St. Jim and LaRae moved in with their three year old son, Joey and newborn daughter, Veronica. Next door to them were Doug and Marie with their twin boys Joey’s age, Brandon and Darren. Two years after having Ryan, Diane had another baby boy and they named him Cory. We were all doing our part in procreation with our eleven kids between the five families and we all enjoyed a wonderful sense of community.
With all of these babies on the block, Josh and Missy thought we should have one of our own. So with Don’s help they persuaded me to have another baby. I became pregnant but the baby did not survive the first trimester. Before I knew it I was pregnant again and we had a beautiful baby girl, Amanda Rose.
While I was pregnant with Amanda, John and Diane moved their family to Colorado. Josh and Missy were so sad to say goodbye to their friends. I think it was especially hard on Josh because he and Jeremy were so close. He was having a particularly hard day one time and said to me with tears in his eyes, “I miss the good old days when Jer was still here!” My heart broke for him.
When it came time for Amanda to move out of the bassinet in our room we thought it would be a good idea to let Josh have the room upstairs for his bedroom so that Missy and Amanda could each have their own room. Josh agreed. The upstairs had served many purposes over the years: sewing room; school room during our early years of home-schooling; exercise room; hobby room; storage. At the time it was not serving any function other than storage so we moved things around and moved Josh upstairs and I went to work painting the girls’ rooms white with a pretty pink trim to match Missy’s still unfinished quilt.
One thing about the upstairs was the “black hole”. This was an opening in the back of the room that led to the attic space above the front rooms of the house. The “black hole” was hidden behind a cabinet. Don and the kids had explored in the rafters of the “black hole” on several occasions and it had become the source of scary stories concocted in the imaginations of my husband and children over the years. Josh had not been in his new bedroom very long before I began to find him sleeping on the couch when I got up in the morning. He confessed that it was too scary to sleep up there with the “black hole”. So we moved the girls in together and moved Josh back down to the front bedroom.
A few years later Josh was ready to face his nightmares and moved his things back upstairs and created for himself a teenage boy’s dream bedroom with huge posters on the slanted ceiling and a sectional couch given to him when Grandma & Grandpa moved to Mexico. Melissa was very happy not to have to share a bedroom with her baby sister anymore.
Our years on Pine St. saw us through so many life events. Don and I learned what it was to be husband and wife, Daddy and Mommy. .We grieved the loss of Don’s grandmother and my grandfather. We home-schooled Josh and Melissa for eleven years. We experienced my parents moving nearby to Oakley then far away to Mexico. We had survived substance abuse, knee surgery, back surgery, and a miscarriage. We had experienced the joy of new babies. We had devoted our lives and our family to Jesus. We had celebrated Christmases, Easters and Halloweens; birthdays and anniversaries. We had taught our children to ride their bikes and roller blades, kissed their booboos and saw Amanda through sleep apnea & a tonsillectomy to remedy the sleep apnea. We experienced hot summer days without an air conditioner and cold winter nights in front of the fireplace with warnings to the children in order to prevent them from burning their little feet on the brass grates of the floor furnaces. We watched as Josh and Melissa fell in love for the first time. We taught them how to drive and watched prayerfully as they pulled away from the house on their first solo drive in the family car. We had guided them through the steps of obtaining their own first vehicles. We had experienced unemployment, job changes, and disability. We had enjoyed times of plenty as well as hard times. I had provided child care for friends, family and neighbors off and on through the years. We had all felt the sadness of neighbors moving away and passing away and divorcing.
We took care of the house at 1362 Pine St. as if it were our own. As I told Sarah’s daughter-in-law, Paula, when she & their son took over as our landlords, we may not have been the homeowners but the house was our family’s home and that was very important to us. We watered the grass and trimmed the trees. We trimmed the english ivy that climbed the walls of the detached garage and threatened to take over the back yard. We removed overgrown shrubs and built a little deck with a picket railing to extend the front porch. We demolished the deteriorating patio that housed a colony of mice. Don replaced the water heater and the toilet. I worked hard for two summers to paint the kitchen (home-schoolers do things in the summer that other families save for the school year), redoing all of the cabinet doors which had layers and layers of paint preventing them from closing properly. I painted the front rooms of the house, giving life and color to the beautiful baseboards and picture rails, and bringing out the craftsmanship of the old fireplace. But the thing I am most proud of doing to that house was building the driveway/patio.
It took a while but we were finally able to impress upon our new landlords that the old red ribbon driveway was a hazard with cracks you could lose your foot in. When the contractors tore out the old driveway I salvaged all of the large pieces. It took me a long time but I managed to piece them all together to form a new patio where the old one had been at the back of the house. I filled in the spaces between with dirt and coaxed the Bermuda grass that comprised the back lawn into the cracks. By the next summer it was a work of art! Don was amazed at my resourcefulness and patience.
I’ll never forget the day I received the phone call from Paula informing me that they wanted us to move out of the house so that they could fix it up and rent it out for more money. I was devastated. I called Don and cried my heart out. I couldn’t believe that after all of those years we were being asked to move out with only six weeks notice!
The times when we have driven by the old house have revealed to us a neglect that is heart breaking. We have learned that both tenants have been evicted and so it is hard to see how the landlords are benefiting financially from their decision to move us out. But what saddens me most is the condition of the house itself. I had loved that house! Melissa used to say that she never wanted to move out of the house on Pine St. She loved it, too.
I know that our home is in Heaven and we should never get too attached to the things of this world, including a house. But it can be hard for us women with that famous nesting instinct not to become too attached to the family homeâÂ?¦even if we don’t own it.
