February 2003 Issue - Essay # 2
Some
Thoughts About Houses and Homes
By Kari Karlson
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Thirteen-eighty-seven,
Lahti Drive. That’s where
my house is--the first house we ever bought.
There were still four of us the year we bought this house.
The blue spruce in the northwest corner of the backyard was only
chest-high then, and the blueberry bushes were withered and
haggard--like those children you see on “Sponsor-A-Child”
commercials. I think the
former owners put a Do-Not-Resuscitate order on them.
The red delicious and the granny smith trees were still
struggling beside the shed--that was before Dad took the axe to them.
(Mom still hasn’t forgiven him for that.) When
we first bought the house, that spot in the kitchen ceiling over the
breakfast nook didn’t leak every time it rained, but if I filled my
bathtub too full, the water would drip out through the basement ceiling
all over Mom’s sewing machine. The
house came with a taupe-colored refrigerator that didn’t match any of
the wallpaper or carpeting, and it was an absolutely useless contraption
because it froze all the food on the middle shelf and spoiled the food
on all the other shelves. In
those days, the dining-room table was more than a collection spot for
books, papers, receipts, bank statements, and ads from the previous
Sunday’s paper--before Mom went to work, when we actually ate
home-burned meals in the dining room, together.
(I say home-burned meals, because we’ve since had to replace
the oven because it only worked on one temperature--high.) That
was back when Dad had more hair on his head and less sag on his waist,
and Mom was, as I mentioned before, still a member of the ever-shrinking
ranks of the Great American housewife.
Mom sewed a lot back then, too.
She’d sit down in our basement all day, and all we’d hear was
the whirring of the sewing machine and an occasional groan when she
realized she’d made a mistake and would have to tear out an entire
seam. We’d check on her
every now and then, and all we’d see was one bare foot sticking out of
yards and yards of fabric, furiously working the foot pedal on the
sewing machine. Mom never
wore shoes; even when she went out, she’d just slip into her pair of
ratty old sandals. Andrea,
my older sister, still lived with us when she wasn’t at college.
Usually, she only came home for a few weeks at Christmas and in
the summer--just long enough to update us on her latest breakup and
newest boyfriend, catch a few home-cooked meals, and rifle through her
closet to find out which of her outfits I’d taken custody of while she
was away. I
was just finishing up eleventh grade, and I was becoming very good
friends with a boy in my class--the kind of very good friends that I
hoped would eventually result in a boyfriend.
But
I was talking about our house, wasn’t I?
We all loved this house when we bought it.
It’s the first house we’ve lived in that didn’t have
burnt-umber shag carpets, or wood-shake siding, or a single, forty-watt
light bulb in the garage, providing just enough illumination to see the
twelve-foot, man-eating tarantulas glaring at us with evil red eyes from the
inky-black corners. Okay, they were daddy-long-legs.
But a spider is a spider! The
house has an upstairs, too. I had always dreamed of living in a house
with an upstairs. All good
families on TV lived in houses with an upstairs (like the Cleavers, the
Taylors, and the Waltons). And
my room is actually big enough to fit a double bed in it with enough
room left over that I don’t find myself prostrate on my mattress every
time I walk through the door. This
past April made our fifth year of living in this house--that probably
doesn’t seem like a long time to you, but to me, five years is
practically forever. My dad
was in the Army, so we moved every couple of years until he retired.
Until I was nine, I thought my physical address was an army post
office box somewhere in Munich. I
didn’t know people actually lived in the same place long enough to
have letters delivered to their homes.
Yeah, five years is a long time. It’s
funny how things change when you go away.
I left for college three years ago, and the first time I came
back, I was amazed at how different my house was.
Sure, the cottage-cheese texture stuff on the ceilings was still
there, and the rooms still smelled like those Country Gardens
air-fresheners that mom plugs into the outlets.
But it was different somehow.
The counters in the bathroom seemed shorter than I remembered,
and the carpets were sort of dingy and worn-looking.
The blue spruce in the backyard was almost as tall as the house.
My sister had gotten married and moved to Wisconsin, and Mom had
redecorated her room, stuffing all her things in boxes in the closet. My
family was different, too. I
came home from college after that first semester and was greeted at the
airport by two strangers masquerading as my parents.
I almost walked past them because they looked so much different
than I remembered. Dad’s
hair (what was left of it) was turning silver at the temples, and Mom
was all dressed up because she’d come home from work.
And she was wearing shoes. But
they were my parents. I knew
it the day Mom came home after a long day’s work and made lasagna, my
favorite meal, “just because.” I
knew it the day Dad and I sat in the living room watching The Princess
Bride for the gazillionth time and still laughing at the same old
places--not because they’re funny anymore, but because we’ve always
laughed at them, and for the moment, we could forget that I’d grown
five inches and gone away to college, and that Mom had joined the
working world, and Dad had grown gray around the temples.
We were a family again, like we used to be.
But things were still different. Sometimes,
when I sit back and watching things, I feel like I’ve been blinked
into some kind of weird limbo where everything around me grows up, fills
out, moves on, changes, and I’m stuck in this awkward
no-longer-a-child-not-yet-an-adult stage. I
guess I’ve changed a little bit too, just like my house, and my
family. I’ve gotten a
little confused about life. I
used to know all the answers. I
used to know where I was going, what I believed in, what I was going to
do when I grew up. I used to
wear my halo spit-shined and polished right out in front where everyone
could see it. And now,
sometimes I hide it in my back pocket while I partake of the forbidden
fruit--just because there’s no one to stop me.
Just because I want to find out why it’s forbidden.
Part of me hates that side of me.
Part of me yearns to know and love my Savior, to live for Him and
be used of Him. Part of me wants to be a child forever--trusting,
believing, eyes wide open, seeing the world through a filter of
innocence. But part of me
yearns for that elusive freedom that we all seek and never find--that
blessed status of adulthood with all its privilege and responsibility.
Part of me aches to be on my own. On
my own. Leave this house,
these strangers who have had such an intimate part of my life, this
feathered nest of comfort and its meager measure of dependability?
Can I? Can I leave
this house and these people that I have come to know and love as “my
home?” These walls that
have witnessed my metamorphosis from childhood to adulthood, heard ever
angry “You don’t understand,” every frustrated sob, ever late
night argument with my parents, every lonely thought.
These walls that were there the day Dad finally handed over the
car keys with a “Call when you get there, call when you leave.”
These walls that were there the day I received my first phone
call from a boy, the day I came downstairs to show off my cap and gown,
the day my sister tiptoed into my room at three o’clock in the morning
to show me her ring and tell me “Doug asked me tonight.”
These walls that were there the day I left for college--that
have been here every time I’ve returned.
Can I leave them? I’ll
miss them. I’ll miss this
house. I’ll miss the
family photo gallery hanging in uniform 8x10 frames in the upstairs
hallway. I’ll miss the way
the carpet sinks beneath my stocking-feet, and the way the second step
from the top creaks when you walk on it in the middle of the night.
I’ll miss the way all Mom’s magnets fall off the refrigerator
door every time I close it. I’ll
miss how Dad always leaves his empty tea glass by his chair in front of
the TV and how Mom leaves her shoes and socks on the stairs by the front
door where she takes them off the minute she comes inside. I
don’t really know why I’m babbling about my family and my home and
growing up--I’m supposed to be writing about my house, and besides, I
still have a year of college left. On
second thought, I do know why I’m babbling about all this: because
this house has become my home, and the older I get, the shorter one
lousy year gets. I know the
time to leave will be here way before I’m ready for it to come. And
I worry. I worry that I
won’t be able to find a place to live.
I worry that I’ll not be able to afford a car, an apartment,
bills, groceries--all the things that come with living on my own.
I worry that I won’t be able to find a job.
I worry that I’ll forget all my parents’ advice and become
the example of evil that all parents wave over the heads of their
wayward children, or that I’ll get stuck in a rut of tradition and
never branch out and make my own way in life.
I worry that I’ll get lost, that my eyes will water at my first
interview, that no one will get my sense of humor.
Mostly though, I worry that I’ll never be able to find another
place quite like home.
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Author's Biography I live in Bellingham,
Washington, on those ever-brief interludes in my college training that
someone, somewhere had the audacity to call "vacation." E-mail Kari at sunnykaybee@juno.com
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Essay
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