Surely You're Not Going to Stay
Our house is the house that my Dad's parents first bought in the early 1950's when Decatur, Georgia, was still a bedroom community to Atlanta.
My parents bought the house from my grandmother when she moved into an assisted-living community nearby in the mid 1990's. My parents were gracious in letting us rent the house for years at very market-friendly rates, and in October of last year, we worked out a deal where I (meaning my wife and I, of course,) bought the house from them.
As I was going through the loan application with the mortgage broker, he explained to me that I would have the house for three or four years and then sell it, and he wanted to base the loan on that theory. He told me that "everyone does this." I explained the above history to him, and he dismissed my protestations and assured me that I would be moving on in a few years.
I have read a lot of Wendell Berry, G.K. Chesterton, and a (relative) newcomer Rod Dreher, who have written of the virtues of staying put, and growing a family as one grows a garden or farm. One does not reap a bountiful harvest by uprooting the plants every year and moving them 300 miles. Of course, one must nourish the soil and care for it, but if done properly, the earth will sustain life for a very long time.
I love the fact that my house (our house) still smells the same as it did when I walked into it as a child to visit my grandparents. Even after a major renovation in 1996 and the contributions of Olive (our Basset Hound) haven't eliminated the smell. The smell is that of old wood and incense, and it's there for me, every time I walk in. The original refrigerator that came with the house is still plugged in and still works in the basement. The refrigerator is one of those coffin lidded behemoths with the (deadly) locking handle.
We have many, many pictures of my family (aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sister) in this house celebrating holidays, birthdays, and plain old visits in this house. The clothes and hair give a pretty good idea when they happened. When I was a kid, we visited both sets of grandparents almost every weekend, or so I remember it. My paternal grandparents lived about 500 yards away on a different street, so we usually saw both sets the same day. What great memories I have of my grandparents, and how blessed am I that my parents gave me that gift.
I spents hours and hours in this house as a child visiting my grandparents, and just the other day, I was explaininging to a visitor, and demonstrating how the refrigerator used to be here, and we would open it up, and be amazed at the old 12 ounce glass bottles of Coke, which we always had to have poured into a glass. I can still feel the feeling of my teeth scraping together and sliding off of one another from all of the sugar that used to be used in Coke in the orthodox days for corn syrup became cheaper and easier.
My parents live in the house in which I grew up in nearby Dunwwody. These days, we pack up the kids and take the exact opposite trip that I took to visit my grandparents. We visit them a lot. On purpose.
My parents bought the house from my grandmother when she moved into an assisted-living community nearby in the mid 1990's. My parents were gracious in letting us rent the house for years at very market-friendly rates, and in October of last year, we worked out a deal where I (meaning my wife and I, of course,) bought the house from them.
As I was going through the loan application with the mortgage broker, he explained to me that I would have the house for three or four years and then sell it, and he wanted to base the loan on that theory. He told me that "everyone does this." I explained the above history to him, and he dismissed my protestations and assured me that I would be moving on in a few years.
I have read a lot of Wendell Berry, G.K. Chesterton, and a (relative) newcomer Rod Dreher, who have written of the virtues of staying put, and growing a family as one grows a garden or farm. One does not reap a bountiful harvest by uprooting the plants every year and moving them 300 miles. Of course, one must nourish the soil and care for it, but if done properly, the earth will sustain life for a very long time.
I love the fact that my house (our house) still smells the same as it did when I walked into it as a child to visit my grandparents. Even after a major renovation in 1996 and the contributions of Olive (our Basset Hound) haven't eliminated the smell. The smell is that of old wood and incense, and it's there for me, every time I walk in. The original refrigerator that came with the house is still plugged in and still works in the basement. The refrigerator is one of those coffin lidded behemoths with the (deadly) locking handle.
We have many, many pictures of my family (aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sister) in this house celebrating holidays, birthdays, and plain old visits in this house. The clothes and hair give a pretty good idea when they happened. When I was a kid, we visited both sets of grandparents almost every weekend, or so I remember it. My paternal grandparents lived about 500 yards away on a different street, so we usually saw both sets the same day. What great memories I have of my grandparents, and how blessed am I that my parents gave me that gift.
I spents hours and hours in this house as a child visiting my grandparents, and just the other day, I was explaininging to a visitor, and demonstrating how the refrigerator used to be here, and we would open it up, and be amazed at the old 12 ounce glass bottles of Coke, which we always had to have poured into a glass. I can still feel the feeling of my teeth scraping together and sliding off of one another from all of the sugar that used to be used in Coke in the orthodox days for corn syrup became cheaper and easier.
My parents live in the house in which I grew up in nearby Dunwwody. These days, we pack up the kids and take the exact opposite trip that I took to visit my grandparents. We visit them a lot. On purpose.
posted by CatholiCop | 12:49 AM
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