The House That Used To Be A Home

The house I grew up in was torn down last month. I no longer live in the area, but my sister let me know. She’d driven by and seen that it was now a pile of lumber. I’m not sure how I feel about this. I consider it the house I grew up in before I’d call it home. It had once been home but that was almost 50 years ago.

In November 1976, my father died trying to protect that house from a fire in the field next door. Daddy fought the fire while my mother washed the dishes and made us get ready for school. I’m not sure if Mom was naïve or just trusted that Daddy would get it under control. I don’t think it ever occurred to her to get us out of the house to a safe distance. With the wide-eyed innocence of a 9 year old, I stared out the window, watching the fire. I’m not sure how long it was but it felt like days. When it was under control, I sat in a chrome and leather rocking chair in the kitchen as I waited for Daddy to come home. He didn’t. Uncle Bobby, a police officer did come over though. When I saw him, I told my brother that Daddy was dead, which Uncle Bobby confirmed moments later. I grew up that day so yes, this was the house I grew up in.

This was the house in which I took care of my mother. I cooked and cleaned. I watched her care for my cousins while I cared for her, trying to get her attention and approval. I watched my cousins grow up in that house, not overnight like I had but over the years and at what I assumed was a normal pace. I always thought they were immature, and that Mom had babied them. Now, I wonder if they were immature, or if I was more mature than my years.

It was the house where I would hear people drop off my brother, drunk and passed out. Sometimes, they left him in the yard, other times they’d leave him in the kitchen. I remember sneaking out to see if he was alive. When I got my license, I would go pick him up when he had finished a night of drinking. It was before the days of cell phones and GPS. He’d call the dial phone hanging on the kitchen wall and give me a general location where I could find him. I’d go out, sometimes in my pajamas and drive around trying to find him.

Over the years, I watched Mom become a hoarder and a recluse. I avoided taking my kids there whenever possible. I didn’t want them to see how I’d grown up. I would drive an hour to pick Mom up for visits at my house and, when we were done, I’d drive her home or coordinate her transport with my sister. During this time, she physically declined, looking far older than her age. She struggled to walk and used a cane or wheelchair. She had my cousin build a ramp to make it easier for her to come and go. Unfortunately, it was at an angle that paramedics couldn’t bring a stretcher in when she fell and broke her leg. She had to hobble out on her own.

Sometime around 2012, I convinced Mom to let me help her to clean up a bit. It was a painful and long process, as she would make me show her everything before I’d put it in the garbage bag. Yes, the garbage bag, not bags… I filled one bag on the first day. At one point, I started to throw out an empty Whitman’s Chocolates box. Mom abruptly stopped me and made me turn it over so that I could see where she’d noted that it was a gift from my brother. She’d kept it as a memento, he’d died in 2007. The date she’d written on the box was 2005, she’d kept it for 2 years before he died. I told her I would be back the next day and drove home. When I returned, I asked if she was ready to throw it out. She reluctantly agreed and put it in the bag. I brought the trash bag home with me because I was sure she’d be digging through the trash if I didn’t.

At one point, due to a local construction project, her well water was tested and determined to be not for consumption. Mom had access to public water but refused to make the change. She said she switched to bottled water, but I noticed that all of the bottles in the refrigerator were cracked open and obviously being reused with tap water. She said my cousin opened them to make it easier for her. Maybe that was the truth, but I stopped drinking water during visits unless I brought a bottle with me.

In the summer of 2018, Mom was hospitalized. She was diagnosed with anaplasmosis from being bitten by a tick, presumably carried into the house by some critter. When her cognition was tested, she failed and wasn’t able to go home alone. She was admitted to a nursing home and expected to be there for the long term. She was very angry. My kids, now adults, visited her at the nursing home with me. When we needed to get Mom’s checkbook, she told me where to find it. The kids and I drove up to the house to get it. There was no way that the checkbook was where she had told me, you couldn’t enter the room and there were cobwebs everywhere.

I remember their faces when they went into the house. They were horrified by what they saw. There was only a path for Mom to get around between the kitchen, living room and bathroom. It was a narrow path, perfect for a tiny woman of 100 pounds. No one else could really navigate it without knocking things over. There were mountains of clothing that filled the bathtub, unopened packages of mail order objects littered throughout my old bedroom — to me, they were junk but for some reason she ordered it, even if she never opened the packages. There were cobwebs that revealed rooms no one had entered for years. There were mouse droppings in every room, surrounded by pieces of my childhood that they had chewed to shreds. There were stacks of canned goods, decades beyond their expiration date, the contents of the jars black with rot.

I was her Power of Attorney, so I made the difficult decision to sell the house. My sister and I realized that the house would need to be cleaned out first. We discussed it with Mom, who wasn’t happy, and I assured her that I’d keep important, sentimental items and bring them home with me. My sister and I went to the house, armed with gloves, garbage bags and dressed in light colors so we could see if any ticks or insects got on us. Five days and a massive dumpster later, it was like a different house. Still in disrepair, full of mold from water damage and with undrinkable water but different. The house sat empty until Mom passed away in 2021. That was the last time I was in the house. Mom never returned, which was probably for the best.

At seventeen, I moved out of the house. I moved across the river, to the next city, then on to the big city an hour away and, eventually, halfway across the country. The house was sold about a year after Mom died. This was the house my father died to save — and now It’s a pile of lumber.