My grandparents lived in their house in Ohio for nearly 70 years. My mother was able to visit until she was 63, my uncle Paul till he was 68. I was 40 the last time I was there, just after my grandmother’s funeral.
They had lived in a small town of about 5,000 people. Both my grandfather and my grandmother were born there and died there. With the exception of a couple of years in Buffalo in the 1920s and my grandfather’s service in France in World War I, they lived their entire lives in Crestline.
I loved the time I spent there in the summer, but I remember thinking what a boring place it would be to live as an adult.
I was pretty stupid as a kid, although if you look at the picture of 1-year-old me with my grandfather, I was damn cute.
My parents bought their house in Virginia in 1963. My mother died there — peacefully in her own bed — last Saturday at the age of 93, with two of her five children at her side.
All five of us had the opportunity many times to return to the house where we came of age. I imagine I will see it one last time when I return to go to my mother’s funeral.
It was a nice enough house, and it will sell for 20 times what they paid for it in the days of the New Frontier. I have never been back to Crestline, but with two of my siblings still living in Northern Virginia, I’ll probably go back to Fairfax someday.
In fact, my saddest memory of Crestline was the day of that funeral, when we were inside the house with my Ohio cousins. I remember my cousin Pete saying to me, “Some of our best memories of childhood happened in this house, and now we will probably never come here again.”
You nailed it, cuz.
His family and mine never spent a lot of time together there. We had five kids, they had four and my grandparents only had one extra bedroom.
But that wasn’t the purpose of this story. I was thinking about the fact that my own grandchildren will never see the house where their mother grew up. Thanks to the overheated California housing market, our choice in 2008 was either to sell then or be making mortgage payments until 2025.
We chose Georgia.
We have a beautiful house completely paid for, but when our kids visit us, it’s a house in a city in a state they never lived in.
Oh well.
Time passes, the world changes.
And it is a beautiful house.