Thursday, September 22, 2016

“The house that Ed built... The home that “Mickey” made...

      “Home is where one starts from.” – T.S. Eliot


I was about four years old when I ran into the kitchen and said to my mother, “I don’t want to play in my room.  I hate it here.  I am going to run away!”  As I went for a tiny suitcase, Mom said, “You can run away, just don’t leave the yard.”  That’s when I learned about home and that’s when I realized that my parents were a lot smarter than I would ever give them credit for until now.
Our family home was sold this week.  My father built the house piece by piece, section by section while Mom raised my two sisters, thirteen months apart.  I was the surprise eight years later.  In the 50’s and 60’s, our home was as normal and at times not so normal as anyone else’s.  I can remember my mother cooking and baking each, and I do mean EACH and every day.  I will always remember the couch in the living room where she taught each of us how to knit, crochet and of course there were always books and magazines to read on the coffee table.  My mother would also sit in her rocking chair and quilt.  Every stitch was carefully done.  I learned patience and perseverance watching her.  To this day, I still cannot figure out how she had the patience to finish every single project.  I still have the quilt she made me before I left for college.  I was instructed to wrap myself with it whenever I got lonely.  I did.
Before the closing, as we were cleaning out the house, the kitchen table, still with the marks of homework done each and every night.  My grandmother taught Mom how to make strudel so in the fall, if we were lucky, Mom would be stretching out strudel dough, across that table, and a true authentic Austrian strudel was born. My mom spreading the apples, butter, sugar and cinnamon, carefully rolling up the strudel for the pan was a tradition and a treat.  The smells of those strudels are forever ingrained in me, along with homemade bread.  We never went hungry.  The kitchen was Mom’s sphere of influence.  She taught us all to cook at an early age and her legacy continues.  We’re all very competent cooks.  That table was where I was encouraged to write.  It was where my sister painfully tried to help me with Algebra. 
My father would come home from work, wash his hands, crack open a beer and take a Pall Mall cigarette out and sit at the head of the table while Mom took a roast out, and proudly placed it on that table. He would here our stories without judgment.  That table...so many memories.  All the problems of our family and the world were hashed out at that table.  Some of them were solved.  Some definitely were not.  We played cards and my father would secretly hide cards on us, laughing with a huge, glorious grin on his face.  He wanted to see who was paying attention. 
Our home is where I learned to take risks.  My mother watched in horror as I tried to lasso the horse belonging to the farmer that bordered the property by standing on the rock wall tempting him with a carrot.  I wanted to horseback ride like my sisters.  Again, I was four. I learned how to be afraid.  Afraid of disappointing both my parents, I did what was asked...most of the time.  In our home, no one was perfect.  No one ever would be.  
Our home was where I learned to say “Goodbye” when I watched my sisters leave for college and then marry.  I eventually would said, Goodbye” too.  Mom and Dad with their hard earned money sent each of us to college. I hated those first weeks of college and came home and told my father so. He sat on the couch with me and said, “This house, is always open to you Claude.  But I really think you should give college more of a try.”   I finally left the yard.  I would come back but I finally left the yard.
The new owners of our family home will change it.  Reinvent it.  They will make it their home.  Before the closing, I drove over to the house and dropped off the garage door opener.  I took one more look around the house.  The bedroom where Mom would read to me still gave me comfort.  She read to me every night.  When my grandmother came to live with us, this was where she stayed.  Where she stayed until, she passed.  My parents’ bedroom...where I would crawl into bed, afraid of the dark...where they fought...where they planned. ..where Ma would sleep alone after Dad passed.  Try as I might, I will never manage my home as well as they did.  They had the skills that a country’s Great Depression and two world wars create. 
Change is never easy.  In fact it can be terribly painful and then...then there is peace.  Peace that we have done the right things by our loved ones, our parents.  My father would have been proud of what we’ve done with the house and how we have taken care of Mom.  Mom has said, “I did my job.”  She did so and then some.  My father did his job by his family too.  We have the memories to prove it.  Good, bad and ugly...they are our memories and they are ours forever.  How lucky we were and are.

No comments:

Post a Comment