Tell me if you have that place, the one you go to in your mind when someone talks about home. I do, and it is not what you would expect.
I remember the board game Clue. It had a conservatory, a library, and other high-sounding rooms. And we would draw our future houses with those rooms. Cinderella lived, eventually, in a palace. All of the princesses of childhood did. And we thought that we wanted the big house with the hundred rooms.
In the Conservatory with the vintage hats.
Now, however, the home I miss would fit no grand parameters. The conservatory was the endless green lawn with lilac bushes, a weeping willow, a hundred year old walnut tree, and a rose bush that defied the magic of fairy tales in its delicate pink beauty. The library was a big table in one of its large square bedrooms. Though far from a palace, the home my mind goes back to was my grandmother’s.
By the time I knew it, the house had stood for a hundred years. It was built to house more than one family, so it had two front doors. If you closed the doors between the two front rooms and two back rooms, you suddenly had two homes. But I knew it as one house with four big, square rooms and a long kitchen on the side.
I remember when I was four, there was a hole in the front porch. My Grandfather attended to that, and in a rural upgrade, he added asbestos siding. I watched in awe as he pounded double headed nails, explaining that the bottom head stopped the pounding before the siding could be damaged.
Inside, my Mamaw would put up wallpaper, matching it to the blue painted floorboards. The stove was fueled by bottle gas, and a wood stove warmed the room in winter. The beds had real bedsprings, and since it was a farm, at night you could hear as a mouse would scurry across them.
We lost the house in the l974 tornado outbreak. That which stood for over a hundred years was gone in mere seconds. It would have gone, anyway, old farmhouses are seldom saved.
My grandparents’ home, taken from the cow pasture, ca. 1930 before my grandfather built a new kitchen and sided the house.
But when I think about July 4th and the many men and women who have fought and the many who have died, I think of my grandparents’ farm and the breezes that blew through the apple trees as you sat in their branches, or the stolen grapes we found on the grape arbor. I know that those men and woman of war, Revolutionary to Iraq and beyond, understood about saving what we call home. Here, in my ranch house, which has a sunroom “conservatory,” and a home office “library,” I remain thankful for all of the places I have called home and the memories of the peace we had in them. Those that came before gave us our day of hot dogs, pie, and home. They fought for the home we have now, and the homes of our memories. Whatever we remember, today we should also recall those who have given us the gift of home.
