The house I grew up in--I can't decide whether I like what got done to it or not.

[DFW]

After 22 years of absence, my sister recently visited it. I recognized it because of the shape, but my parents scraped and begged to borrow the then-immense sum of $50,000 to build it in 1955--around five times the going rate for new houses in those days. The only reason they could afford to do even that is because it was so far out in the middle of nowhere, there weren't even paved roads in the neighborhood at the time. We were the third house in the area. When it rained, my dad couldn't even get to work, since our house was at the bottom of an incline, and his car couldn't get up to the road when there was mud. We moved in when I was 3 years old.

Fast forward about five years, and the roads got paved, Washington grew by leaps and bounds, and all of a sudden, the wilderness where we lived turned into "the Washington suburbs." The only thing that didn't change dramatically was his salary as a reporter, a one man Washington correspondent for a newspaper in a one-horse town in upstate New York. The house needed constant work, as the oddball shape (round) brought lots of unusual repairs needed when something went wrong, which was frequently. A LOT of what my dad earned went into that house, but the design was really cool, and it looked out over a man-made lake that had been created in 1913, so, well before anyone lived in (literally) our neck of the woods.

My parents lived and died there. When it came time to figure out the estate, my brother, the only one who ended up returning to Northern Virginia to settle, took it upon himself to be executor of the estate in 2002. The last thing to get settled was the house. He had his own house in the Langley area to be near work, and my parents certainly weren't going to force him to take it over. I would have if I had been in a financial position to do so, simply to keep it in the family. It probably would have ruined me. It had not had major infrastructure work done on it in almost 50 years, and the property, far from being the nearly worthless wilderness it was in 1955, had shot up like crazy in value in the meantime. I couldn't handle both the estate taxes and paying my brother and sister their share of the cash left over. It had to get sold to someone with a couple hundred thousand dollars to spare to fix it up and bring it out of the stone age. Where is Frank Lloyd Wright when you need him?

I have never met the people who bought it and fixed it up. My sister was down there a couple of weeks ago for some school reunion thing, and went to visit the house (there was no one home when she tried to go visit the new owners). Holy renovation, Batman. They must have put almost as much into the house as they spent to buy it in the first place. Tan flagstone and landscaped back yard? WTF? But the shape and those great windows we used to stare out of, watching lightning hit the lake during thunderstorms--they were unmistakable. No longer "our" house, but still "the" house. I haven't seen it since our mom died there in 2002. I'm not even sure I want to see the interior. I'm sure it's fancy as hell, but when I was last in there, it was just the same old place in 2002 as the one we grew up in. My wife was there so often that she said all she had to do was smell the interior, and she knew immediately she was in "my" house. I'm probably better off with the memories. If your roots are gone, at least you can keep the memories alive.

My super-successful daughter had a pipe dream of someday buying the house and getting is back in the family. She can certainly now afford it, although no one knows who of us could ever live there. Maybe one of the grandchildren? At any rate someone who doesn't remember that where there is fancy tan flagstone now, there used to be white paint before, paint that was always peeling because getting the whole exterior re-painted was just too big a job for us peasants. The tan flagstone apparently now also has replaced the "steps" that my parents had leading down to the lake. When we lived there, it was railroad ties. There would be a LOT of getting used to for my siblings and me.

My daughter could probably afford to buy it if it ever became available again, but it would be a chuck of change for sure. She is now extremely well-off, makes many multiples of what I do, but who knows what price would get asked for it, even if it's not exactly Beverly Hills? Who knows, for that matter, if she would even want a property she couldn't live in (for the near future, anyway), or rent out to family?

Still, here I am, living on another continent, the only roots to my European ancestors long vanished, so this was the only real root I had. When the house was sold 22 years ago, I knew my last physical root was going, but it's not like I had an option I could take or leave. Leave WAS the only option. When I saw that photo, it was almost like seeing a beautiful long-term girlfriend who married a rich guy and had herself adorned by all that the finest clothing designers and plastic surgeons could provide. You remember the longing. It's definitely still there. But you no longer feel it anywhere nearly as acutely as you did at the time of separation.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. What an eloquent remembrance, my dear DFW!

Regret and longing: two human characteristics. I read them loud and clear in your vast post.

Your post falls into the category of 'things we aren't permitted to get over.'

Thank you.

[cachukis]

2. Must have been an enjoyable reminiscence.

[Archae]

3. The house I mostly grew up in...

In Howards Grove, Wisconsin.

Link to tweet

The window second from the left, was my bedroom.

The house has changed hands several times since then, (it's rather large,) and nowadays I have no idea who's in it.

[DFW]

4. This is what it looks like now

View from the back (lakeside) looking up:

[onethatcares]

5. that's a beautiful house

retaining walls, flagstone and money is all it takes

[DFW]

6. They must have stuck a fortune into the place

It sure didn’t look like that when I lived there. The structure was already there, but the flagstone and landscaping are completely new.

[AllaN01Bear]

8. wow!

too bad du dosnt have a omg emoticon.

[DFW]

9. Yes, the people who bought it seemed to have plenty of money to sink into it

That was something we never had. Seventy years ago, my parents (so I’m told) had to beg and borrow from every friend and relative they had to build the house. I am far more conservative by nature, and probably never would have risked getting my ass that deeply into debt to build a dream house.

Besides, my wife is European, and never would’ve agreed to a house that was only reachable by car. She grew up in small towns where you could reach anyone or anything on foot within twenty minutes max. If we can’t get to town by foot or a quick bicycle ride, it doesn’t matter to her in the slightest how fancy a house is. For her, if you NEED a car for the simplest things, then it might as well be a well-appointed jail as far as she’s concerned.

[AllaN01Bear]

10. one nice thing , unlike here i could walk all over the place or i could take the bus all over the place.

mom taught in the local school district could walk or if need be drive for a mile to each different school where she taugt as the glendora unified closed each school.

[Hekate]

12. How beautiful. Even remodeled & gussied up, I can tell that house started with lovely bones.

[malthaussen]

14. A beautiful house, for sure.

And one look tells you it is very high-maintenance. I'm sure a vintage photo of the property would say much the same.

-- Mal

[DFW]

17. I probably have one somewhere.

When a place was your home (or parents’ home) for 45 years, it becomes so familiar, you never think of it as some landmark worthy of photographing.

[AllaN01Bear]

7. i have seen my childhood home via google earth. the house has been modded and remodded several times .

still has the basic form that i remember . one owner paved over the side yard for parking.

[NNadir]

11. I grew up in a little GI bill tract house that my parents bought when I was two. My father was a laborer who never...

...got past the 8th grade. (My mother finished 10th grade.) At various times, I was told, my mother had to pawn her wedding ring (which my wife now wears) to put food on the table during strikes and the like. When the strikes ended, they'd get it out of hock.

It seemed like a magical place to me, that house. When I was a child I didn't know anything about the struggle. Moving into it is my earliest memory. I was two.

After my mother died, and my father remarried to a widow and moved to her house, my future wife and I rented the house from him for a summer before moving out to California. It was a strange time in my life. My wife was a doctor's daughter; and grew up in much larger, albeit less happy domiciles. She was fine with temporarily living in that little house. I remember the fun of having a new lover there, the lover who would become THE lover of my life, but as for having an emotion connection beyond that, it didn't mean much.

My father sold the house ultimately, and flew out to California to give me a little bit of the cash from the sale, which was nice, but unexpected. (His pension had vanished with Jimmy Hoffa's body and he certainly could have used the money.) He made a killing on the house, which kept him afloat until cigarettes killed him.

I drove by that house about 15 years ago when we were out on Long Island visiting a cousin. It had been remodeled, the incredibly tiny kitchen enlarged by building out into the front yard, my father's design eccentricities all removed. I hardly know why I went out of my way to see it, other than to show my boys where I grew up.

It didn't mean anything at all to me, frankly, other than to remind me of my youthful provincialism. I would never think of bringing it back into my family. My life there was as transitory as the wind. I had a relatively happy childhood, but the life thereafter was the life that mattered.

[LudwigPastorius]

13. Mine was a 3 bedroom/1 bath built in 1948.

I'm not sure what my parents paid for it, but someone recently redid it and tacked on an additional 900 square feet that takes up almost half of the backyard...right where our sandbox and climbing tree used to be.

It sold for half a million recently.

[malthaussen]

15. I don't have anywhere where I could say "I grew up"

We moved a lot when I was growing up. Then I lived for 45 years in the same apartment, but I was already more-or-less "grown up" when I moved there.

Now I'm back in Pittsburgh, where I spent the first 10 years of my life (in three places). I've visited the duplex where I spent most of those years, it hasn't changed a bit since 1960. Outside, anyway. Dunno about inside.

Some of the other houses on the street have been converted to apartments. "Townhouse Apartments," which is an awfully glamorous name for half a post-War People Box. It would be funny if I could rent one, but they're too expensive for me.

-- Mal

[DFW]

19. The other way around for me

I was in Virginia/Washington until the age of 16. Then: Spain, Massachusetts, Philadelphia (5 years), then the Boston area for a few years, and then over here to Europe when my wife-to-be made me an offer I couldn’t refuse (namely, “want to live with me near the banks of the Rhein River?” ). Of the possible options I was considering, “no” was not among them. We’ve lived in a few places. First in a gritty factory town in the Ruhr industrial area, and then finally now in our old medieval town near Düsseldorf.

I suppose I could be persuaded to move again, but I haven’t yet heard the argument persuasive enough to make me want to do it. I’ll run to the airport and fly anywhere, but I want to come home to our simple little house outside Düsseldorf. I could move back in to my parents’ old house, the one in the photo, simply because the memories are so etched into my memory, but my wife wouldn’t want to live anywhere where a car is a necessity, so it ain’t gonna happen, and anyway, no house is worth losing her.

[Emile]

16. The house I grew up in was on the poor side of

town. The old house was torn down 40 years ago. They are still tearing down old houses in that neighborhood. They even bulldozed over my old grade school where Gene Hackman went to school.

[DFW]

20. That house I grew up in wasn't even in a neighborhood when my parents built it.

It was in a wooded wilderness way outside Falls Church, Virginia that had only two houses in it—ours was the third—and no paved roads.

[hunter]

18. The magical places of my childhood have been obliterated by wealthy white people.

My parents would always move on just before property values skyrocketed. If they'd simply stayed put in any of the places where I grew up they might have been wealthy too. But they never saw their homes as investments. Their homes were always live-in art studios.

The last place I lived as a child, which was then surrounded by orchards and wild places, is now a wasteland of multi-million dollar McMansions and mini-ranches.