HOME AGAIN, No I really mean Home AGAIN

 

My musings today, for this week, concern coming home again. Really. I have learned

several corrections to my previous misconceptions about home now that I have come home to live in my childhood home after not living here for about fifty years. They are such little things, yet they seem large to me because all of them concern  events that I have told stories about all my life.

It’s sort of like the family roast story (not mine) that you may have heard. A woman always cut one end off the roast she prepared every year for the holidays. When her daughter asked her why, she said, “I don’t know, really. That’s what your grandma did, so I do too. I really think because it’s juicier that way, probably.” Sure. Juicier. But she thought she’d call and ask her grandma anyway, so she did. Her grandmother said, “Well, it was the pan I had. I could never fit the whole roast in that we needed to feed the family, so I cut one side off and roasted it separately.”

So many stories I never asked why, just passed them on. A little off in many cases.

Since I moved back into the neighborhood, I have been telling everyone the story of how my dad built the second house in this whole allotment and that the first house was built by Orion and Susie Evans, and how, their first winter, they had no water but my dad had dug a well and he ran a hose between our house and theirs, about a football field away, so it must have been some hose. This month, the city is putting in new water mains on Oneida, Saratoga, Tioga, and Mohawk Streets behind us, here in what was originally named "Indianola Estates," so I have been telling all the workmen that story as I walk by with my dogs.

Then because Orion and Susie had a daughter name Barbara, who became my baby sitter and drum teacher and because I am living at home once more and she was having an 82^nd birthday, I took her out to lunch and reminisced about our parents and houses and water. She looked at me a long minute. “Diane, my dad didn’t build the first house. Your dad built the first house. My dad was waiting for the public water to go in and started building when he got the go-ahead on water. But then they hit something like quicksand and told Dad we wouldn’t get water till spring. And so your dad ran the hose.” She was seven at that time, and I was not yet born, and all our parents are dead, so she is the authority on this one.

I suppose it doesn’t matter who was here first or second. I’m just sort of gob-smacked that for the past few years since moving back, I have made a point of introducing myself to the neighbors as the daughter of the man who built the second house here and that house up on the hill was the first.

My mother would be shaking her head and saying the point is that this has always been the kind of neighborhood where people didn’t really socialize and no one was into anyone’s business, but if you needed help, they showed up. 

In our case, we showed up with a hose.