December 28, 2021
Coming up the hill of our driveway after a sunset walk tonight, I looked at our modest colonial house with the colored Christmas tree lights glittering through the windows and said to my husband, “If someone had told me this would be my home when I was growing up, I would have been so happy.”
Our house is small, modular, and has no real landscaping. But little me would have only seen that the house was two stories, crisp against the night sky, and filled with the colors of a festive Christmas.
It wasn’t just that I grew up poor, but that I grew up ashamed. My parents could have plopped our messy rental house and our chaotic drunken dysfunction in the middle of Maine, and we probably would have ticked along just fine. But we lived outside of Nashville’s Bible Belt, in a fieldstone ranch in the middle of cow fields that sat behind a mason’s lodge (the organization that was our landlord).
By the time I was 8, the field in front of our house had become a flourishing subdivision—where all the houses, lawns, and people looked the same to me. They went to church on Sunday, said yes ma’am and no sir and kept their houses neat and ready like an episode of “Leave it to Beaver.”
While the subdivision was being built, my siblings and I would play and explore in the houses after the builders had left for the day, dreaming they were ours. We were dirty (we only took tubs on Sundays, in reused water—washing in order of age—a dingy, cold reality for me as the youngest); we were outsiders—feral white trash of overly educated / under employed northern parents.
All I ever wanted was to live in a house with two stories (and a shower)—clean, and ready for visitors. Clean and ready is still a bit of a struggle for me (if you tarry beyond our open downstairs), but from the dark outside, our home would have sat majestic to me—a dream realized.
(with 2 showers to boot!)
