The home that survived a move
My great-grandparents used to live right around the corner from the funeral home where they arranged — and prepaid — to have their funerals.
On our way to my great-grandfather Papa’s funeral, we turned the corner to visit what is now an empty lot — no house, just lots of standing water.
More than five years ago, Mamarie and Papa had applied to some sort of grant to rebuild homes in poor condition in their area. My mom helped them with the rounds and rounds of paperwork, and finally they were approved. Their lot, however, was not — the grant wouldn’t fund a new house in a flood zone.
So in December 2015, they moved about 10 miles, from Pine Street in Nortonville to a new house on S Madison in Madisonville. If they lived there for five years, the house would be theirs.
Papa died in January 2020. On December 23, 2020, I missed a call from Mamarie.
“This is Mamarie. I was just calling to tell all of you I got my deed today,” she said in a voicemail, her pitch shooting up with glee on the word deed. “I got the deed to the house, I own the house now. Tell your dad when he comes home for dinner. Bye!”
It wasn’t the first house Mamarie had owned; she and Papa had owned the Nortonville house where they had lived for decades. But my great-grandmother, who has worried and saved pennies for all her life, was fixated on that date when she would fully own her new house.
That house does feel like a home — in many ways, it feels the same as the old house. The same painting of fruit that hung over the kitchen table where we colored and drank Hawaiian punch in the old house hangs in the new house’s kitchen. Framed photos of Mamarie and Papa’s sprawling family hung on the wooden slat walls in the old house’s living room; now they hang on the walls of the hallway and Mamarie’s bedroom in the new house. The furniture originally made the trip — the old-fashioned floral couch and loveseat that we used to push together to sleep on — but it’s since been replaced.
One of the things I miss most about the Nortonville house is the covered porch. It joined the main house and the apartment where various family members lived throughout the years. Mamarie and Papa’s dog Sweetie’s dog house was on one side; the newspaper he used to go to the bathroom was on the other. Wires strung above our heads held clothespins and drying laundry (before the house was torn down, I pocketed one of the clothespins). Facing each other were two wooden swings we loved; while swinging out there, our only worry was wasps.
The new house has a nice front patio; every time I talk to Mamarie on the phone, I ask her how much time she’s been spending out there. Recently, she gave me a little glass table to put on my own balcony.
I’m not sure what happened to one of the old swings, but the other is on the back patio of my parents’ house. I remember telling Mamarie and Papa when we put it up; it made them happy to know it was out there.
It’s one scattered piece of the home that multiple generations of my family enjoyed for decades — where my dad played as a kid, where Mamarie and Papa got remarried after divorcing, where we picked green beans with Papa in his garden. Parts of that home live in the house that Mamarie now owns, in my childhood home, and — more than anything — in our memories.
