I never really loved my house. We moved in a month before we were married and it was what we could afford at the time. My husband technically lived with his parents after graduating from college the year before we met, although not long after our first date, ironically, blind, I was finding drawer and closet space for him in my apartment. It made sense to stop making someone else rich with our monthly payment and find a place to own.
The house is a twin; here on the East Coast that means we share a common wall with our neighbor. There are nine rooms, including a full basement and a full attic, and a detached garage out back. The backyard is postage stamp sized but there are enough flower beds, bushes and trees to consume several weekends each year. And there are fourteen steps and sidewalk out front to shovel when the snow comes, as well as a back patio and paths to the garage, trash cans and grill. In our naiveté we thought we were buying something small, probably because it was a twin and not a single building surrounded by a large lot. We had plans to have a place at the beach and thought we were purchasing the perfect home here to allow us to enjoy a place there, by the ocean.
The house was built in 1920 and I’ve always felt it was hard to keep clean, its age no match for cleaning products and elbow grease. Don’t get me wrong, we have beautiful wood doors in every room, stained a rich cherry, as is the trim around the doors and windows, the baseboards, and the banister of the fourteen steps to the second floor. There is a unique and Impressive light on the newel post that people see as soon as they come into the house and their first question is always, “Does it work?” It does.
We have learned some history of the house over the years, through town experts and census records. There are three others like ours on the street, none of them right next to another “twin”. I guess they’re really quadruplets, though, aren’t they? A large manufacturing company used to be across the street and these four twins were built for the Vice Presidents of the corporation back in the day. That’s what we had originally heard but then we came to find out that several of the twins were boarding houses for immigrants who came from Philadelphia to work “in the country” at the production facility. Ours was one of them. Visitors to our house always ask about its origins and we are always proud to share what we know. And yet I always felt that something modern and new was more my style.
The price of a home at the Jersey shore quickly became an abandoned dream; we are not millionaires nor will we inherit property there. There are no other options when it comes to obtaining your own sand castle. Even so, we stayed where we were. It was manageable for our lifestyle: no children and the desire to see and do as much as work and finances would allow. And still I felt deep inside that there is a “better” place for me, of newer construction, shiny and new. But had we moved to a higher-mortgage or found a way to afford a second home by the sea, when I lost my career after waking up without my sight, we would have lost our home. Our homes.
It has only been in the last few years that we learned that boarders once lived here. As I move from room to room in the course of a day I wonder where they slept and what spaces they shared. I wish these walls could talk. We have been painting these walls this year, decorating rooms with a fresh look for the first time since we moved in two and a half decades ago. Scraping, spackling and brushing on new color allows for intimacy, similar to when you dig in the dirt; you feel all the years that came before and you feel a different connection than you do walking the halls for twenty-five years.
My husband and I are planning a few visits to some historical places; I am a well-documented lover of this country’s origins. Doing research for one of these trips the other day, I put down the iPad and went into the kitchen to start making dinner. Switching gears from U.S. history to that of my house, I wondered how many meals had been created in this room, how many people had sat down to dinner here. And it hit me like the ton of bricks used to build what surrounded me: this house is the perfect home for me! I’m the woman who exclaims, “OH, MY!” in the basement crypt containing the remains of John, Abigail, John Quincy and Louisa Adams. I’m the woman who can recite the Gettysburg Address and what the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty reads. I am the woman who once begged a park ranger to please let me spend a night in one of the replica log huts in Valley Forge National Historical Park to experience the horrid conditions in winter. Granted, the woman who made the request was a girl, I was twelve, but you get the point.
It took me awhile to get here. House, I love you. Sometimes you’re exactly where you’re meant to be and you don’t even know it. I live in a house that is full of history, including my own.
