What did I learn today....?: The House That Built Me

"If I could walk around, I swear I'll leave,
Won't take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me."

"The House That Built Me" - Miranda Lambert

Last night as I talked with Cait on the phone, she said something every parent wants to hear. "I had a happy childhood." We talked of her growing up years and the things she was thankful for. "I'm glad we got to grow up next to the woods," she said. I told her I knew how she felt, that my own memories of the woods around my childhood home were a big reason for buying this house. And then she began to list all the things she loved and missed about that house, her Grandma and Grandpa Somerset's home.

In 1966 my parents built a modern multi-level home at the end of a languid Florida bayou. The design was the height of fashion for its day, with a vaulted ceiling of varnished cedar and exposed beams and floor to ceiling windows surrounding the living and dining rooms, yielding an unfettered view of woods and peaceful water. A quarry stone fireplace separating the two rooms was open on three sides. Just sitting on the sofa and looking out made you feel as though you were sitting outdoors, and to watch the wind and rain whip through the woods from that spot during a hurricane was a marvel indeed.

Cait remembers the Sub Zero fridge with the freezer on the bottom, the breakfast bar and upstairs TV room with balcony, the view of the bayou from the kitchen window, the rec room with its own kitchen ("Mom, two families could live in that house!"), and the pool my Dad built, a massive thing 48 feet long, that was our family's gathering spot for years. She remembers the fun she had on the diving board and asked, "How deep was that pool?" Fourteen feet. She remembers the banana tree in the corner.

"Mom, that house was a wonderland!"

And it was! My sisters and I have big memories of its construction. It took nine months to build, and as a family we made frequent visits to the site. We were so excited! While our parents were checking out the progress of the construction, the three of us were scampering up barely-framed stairs to see what new thing had been done.

When I smell fresh-cut pine, it is once again the fall of 1966.

The three of us became human catalogues of our new home's attributes and would rattle them off to any visitor patient enough to listen. It had marble window sills, copper gutters, cedar shake siding, "Chicago brick," smoked glass, harvest gold metal St. Charles kitchen cabinets, with door panels on the dishwasher and refrigerator that matched the kitchen cabinet doors. It was 3500 square feet.

We moved in and the bayou and woods became our playground. We became wild things ourselves, climbing trees, catching baby birds, lizards and horned toads. We wandered trails in the woods, finding an old abandoned house and a burned out trailer and picked through the debris, dragging home the refuse we found inside: tattered, decades-old magazines, ancient Pond's cold cream jars, pint milk bottles and blue glass transformers. We spent endless hours on the three tire swings Dad tied from tall oaks at the edge of the woods. From the dock or the john boat, or with our ankles buried in thick muck, we used sein, hook and trap to catch minnows, catfish, flounder, trout, and blue crabs.

Shoes were worn to school only, no matter the season.

Over the next thirty years the house saw parties and prom photos, and protected us from tornado and hurricane. Eventually us girls married and started our own families, and for years that big old house held us all as we gathered together, with grandchildren scampering up the stairs.

Mom and Dad sold the house years ago. It was too large, much more than my parents needed. It's vintage '60s look wasn't what the market demanded then, and the couple that bought it began building a new and extravagant home twenty feet from the front door. When it was finished, they held an auction and sold off what could be salvaged from our old home. Then they tore it down to make their own view of the bayou.

We were already living in Birmingham at the time, and although I felt some sadness that my childhood home was gone, I was so busy with my own family and home that I didn't really miss it. Not too much.

But talking with Cait brought back all those sweet memories, of bayou and wood and little girls making the memories of a happy childhood in a house that really was a wonderland.