Category: The Way Life Is

The house that occupied the address at 1021 Timber Lane was an unremarkable story-and-a-half red brick structure with a bay window on the lower floor that jutted out toward the narrow concrete walkway leading from the front door to the driveway of the two-car garage facing the street. The first time I saw it in 1964, however, it reminded me of pictures I’d seen of English Tudor country homes with its dormered roof and cedar shutters, and I couldn’t imagine how it came to rest on a cement slab in Rosenberg, Texas. My schoolteacher parents took me to see the house initially when I came home to visit them for Christmas break of my freshman year at The University of Texas in Austin before they purchased the place the following spring. They were like happy, almost giddy children with a new toy and while I shared their excitement of finally having a home that belonged to our immediate family after eighteen years of rental houses and living with my mother’s mother, I was more interested in college life and the girls in Blanton Dormitory at school than I was in a house in a town I had never lived in.

            The women whose lives intersected with mine in that house on Timber Lane deeply impacted the person I am almost fifty years later. My grandmothers, my dad’s sister, my girlfriends, my mother, and her best friend who took care of our home and family through the Timber Lane years and beyond – all of these women walked the rooms of that house with me at some point in the time my parents called it home, and all of them loved me and supported me to the best of their abilities even though I was an absentee family member for over forty years except for random brief visits. Life is about choices, and I chose to leave the safety net of this house on the concrete slab and the family it owned to seek my happiness in other houses with other women in faraway places.

            I live in two houses in two states today and label myself a bi-state-ual. One of the houses is in Texas again where I care for my aging mother who has Alzheimer’s disease and barely recognizes me now. The other is a thousand miles away in South Carolina where I’ve lived my entire adult life. Recently I’ve realized we never really own our homes even though we hold a title to them. We’re really passing through on a journey from here to there. I haven’t quite made it to “there” yet, but I’m getting closer… and have earned the right to call it like I see it.

The Prologue to my book I’ll Call It Like I See It published in 2012 intimated that the upheaval in my life wasn’t limited to expected college adjustments during the  summer of 1964. I graduated from high school on a Friday; my parents drove me from Brazoria to Austin for summer school the following week. Neither of them said one word to me on that three-hour drive about my dad’s accepting a position in school administration at Lamar CISD in Rosenberg, a Houston suburb forty-three miles north of Brazoria. I learned of the move two weeks later when I called them to say I had a ride home from UT with a friend from high school, only to be told by my dad oh by the way, we don’t live in Brazoria anymore. We’ve moved to Rosenberg. We’ll pick you up in nearby Needville. Wow. So much for open family channels of communication.

I started college – they moved to another rental house in a different town in the same breath. I was shocked and felt deceived, selfishly wondering how I would keep in contact with my friends from the five years we lived in Brazoria. I realized in the coming days that would be impossible – Rosenberg wasn’t home, and my friends had moved on, too, to different colleges or jobs or marriages or joining the military or staying at home with parents. When I saw our new place that first weekend I came “home,” the move didn’t strike me as upwardly mobile. Six months later, however, during my first Christmas break I understood what changing positions must have meant to both my dad and my mother financially. They had achieved the American dream after nineteen years of marriage. Finally, two people who had devoted their lives to public schools were able to have that elusive title to their own house.

I gradually got over myself and learned to like the Timber Lane house through the years, but it never felt like home to me. Instead, I subconsciously transferred those feelings of “home” from a house with my parents in an unfamiliar town to familiar houses I knew in Richards where I grew up, the place where my grandparents remained…they were my unchanging anchors when my world felt like a carousel ride where the ticket price changed before the music stopped.

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I’ve had fun “revisiting” my earlier works – I hope you’re enjoying the virtual books tour.