Oh, the Places I have Lived! - Part 3

I asked my mom in recent years how they came to build the house in Corinth. After about 38 years, the details are a little fuzzy, but basically it was just the right person talked to them, it was the right time, the right place and everything happened. Since building has been something we’ve considered, I wish all those pieces would fall in place for us…

 

The house on Wildwood Drive in Corinth is the first house I really remember, but I have lived there twice. And I’ve visited it more times than I can remember. I have a lot of good memories of that house and some hard ones, too. But that’s what a home is, right?

 

I don’t remember my parents building the house or even moving in, but I do remember watching TV in the living room, pretending to be Mary Lou Retton on the swingset in the backyard, playing in the rain with Katey and Fred (the dog) on the driveway, playing in my bedroom, spilling Kool Aid in the kitchen. (I wasn’t even supposed to be pouring Kool Aid and Grandpa shouldn’t have been sleeping when he was supposed to be watching Katey, myself and our friends Aaron, Ryan and Audra while our parents were out; but we were thirsty…and there were clean cups in the dishwasher…and I was FIVE years old…and you get the picture.) I also remember the day we moved out and how much room there was to turn cartwheels in the living room.

 

Later I remembered sleeping in our sleeping bags in the living room, Christmas celebrations, my aunt’s wedding, playing games with my cousins, Sunday lunches, Easter egg hunts, hanging out in the backyard with all my cousins at our grandparent’s 50^thWedding Anniversary, and being momentarily surprised that my cousin didn’t know my parents had built that house and I had lived there until I was five. But, then, why would she? She hadn’t even been born yet. The only way she knew that house was as Grandpa and Grandma’s house. For that matter, it’s the only way six of my siblings knew it, and I’m not sure even Katey remembers living there as she was only two when we left.

 

My parents built the house in Corinth, a tiny town northwest of Dallas, thinking that would be their “forever” home. “Forever” ended up being around two years. At the time they decided to move back to Tennessee, my paternal grandparents (who were living in Iowa) decided to move to Texas. They were going through a hard time, so my parents first rented the house to them and they later bought it. That was in 1985. My grandmother would pass away in 2008, and my grandfather sold the house in 2014. I was a little sad to see it go.

 

For the most part, the house remained unchanged from when my parents built it. My grandparents did knock out the wall of the fourth bedroom to extend the living area sometime before I was in my teens. Some updates were done to the kitchen, bathrooms, and dining area. My grandmother planted so many trees it was a family joke that they lived in the “Texas forest”. The red, blue, white and yellow plaid-ish wallpaper remained on the wall of what had been my bedroom but became an office until I was in my 20s. Then my grandmother, who was colorblind, had a late-life crisis and repainted every room except the kitchen, dining room, and bathrooms in Big Bird Yellow, Fire Truck Red, and Electric Powder Blue. It was a little over the top, but she literally could not see that. And it just seemed to add to the quirks of her hundreds of figurines, plate collection on the wall, and cast iron old fashioned iron collection that sat around the television. 

 

In 2009, when I moved back to Texas, I moved back into that house for thirteen months. I lived in what had been Katey’s bedroom, cooked in the kitchen I knew so well, and cleaned a house I had probably helped clean when I was five. All in all, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the house, working every day and filling my off hours with other activities. But I did successfully cook my first Thanksgiving turkey there, I had fun getting to know my youngest cousin (who is over 20 years younger than I and lives not too far) on several occasions, and it was rather fun (at first) to live in the same place I had lived 25 years before. 

 

Even though that house was not an “ancestral” home by any means, I learned a lot about my family in that home. When I was fifteen and spent a month one summer with my grandparents, my grandmother dug out old family slides, the projector, and a sheet. We went through boxes of old black-and-white photos while they told stories. When we lived in Texas again when I was in my teens, we went over one afternoon to meet Grandpa’s first cousin – a man he had never even met although they grew up in the same town because their fathers (brothers) and fought and never spoke to each other. At their 50^thwedding anniversary, Grandma dug out all kinds of old photo albums and scrapbooks which I spent hours pouring over at the dining room table, learning all kinds of things I had never known about my family. And when I lived with Grandpa, he told me things about when he was first married, and a lot of the trials the Lord put him through.

 

Every place I have lived is full of memories, but that house more than most since I spent so much time there on so many different occasions. It really is sad that it’s no longer in the family.

Wildwood Drive, Corinth, Texas - circa 1985 

The house doesn't look very different today, but the landscape does!