It was five years ago around this time that I was looking for a house in Tellico Plains for me and the kids to live. I had grown up in Tellico and through the years lived at more places than some people would live in three lifetimes. My dad suggested, after a rather lengthy and fruitless search, that I move back into the house I grew up in. He and Mom had built a new house a few years before that and had been renting our home that we shared when we were growing up. I think it must have been some divine intervention that the lady that had lived there for a few years was deciding to pack up and move away.
I hadn’t been in that house in quite a few years and when Dad made the proposition for me to move in, I don’t remember even hesitating. Not only could I be where I grew up, but I could also spend more time with Mom and Dad. Dad had been diagnosed with his Leukemia prior to this and Mom had suffered a heart attack so spending more time with my parents became more of a priority.
When I walked through the doors of that house the first time with my kids I was amazed at how many memories flooded my mind. There wasn’t a room that I walked in that didn’t have some significant reminder of an earlier time in my life. I felt like a kid in a candy store just standing there in the middle of the living room just absorbing all the thoughts of my childhood running through my mind. It felt so good to be home again!
Through the years of living there I have often referred to the house as a money pit because at one time or another over these past five years I have been fixing or remodeling something. At times I have to admit it would get rather discouraging. Then I would remind myself that the house was almost as old as me and I was falling apart too!
There’s wallpaper that has started peeling, flooring that has had to be replaced, enough plumbing issues that require having a plumber on retainer [but then again, we do have one bathroom for five people] and a heating and air unit that has had to be repaired at least three times. I can’t forget the cracks in the wall – my daughter Kailee, bless her heart, lives in fear of waking up with her bedroom being completely separated from the rest of the house if a good tremor comes along. I have done some remodeling and improved this and that, but I don’t want to change too many things because then it would just take away from the character.
But amidst all the trials of maintaining a house that feels like it’s falling apart are things that make it all worthwhile. I am reminded often of those simple things at times when I most need to be. Like when I walk through the hallway between Kailee and Eli’s room at night to tell them good night and the floor creaks beneath me. Every time that happens I instantly smile thinking of all those times when I was a teenager who didn’t want to go to bed, so I would sneak out of my bedroom to lie in the hallway and secretly watch TV in a spy like position so that Mom and Dad wouldn’t see me. That darn floor got me busted so many times that eventually, through some secretive Ninja training while Mom and Dad were at work; I learned to maneuver myself into position without being caught. Then there are the times that I stand in the kitchen cooking and washing dishes and thinking about my Mom being there all those years in the same place I am standing. I can even at times look in the direction of the dining room and see the chair vividly in my mind that my dad would sit in while she cooked. Just the other night I was in my bedroom (ironically the one that I had for part of the time that I was in high school) and I went to raise the window; suddenly a flashback of the time I was sneaking and smoking too close to the screen and burnt a huge hole in it came back to me. I giggled thinking about how I blamed the neighbor boy down the road and told my dad that he must have been trying to look in bedroom window with a lighter and burned it. Poor neighbor boy, my daddy never did care for him after that. Then thinking in the same moment how I sprayed hairspray while I was smoking so they wouldn’t smell it and how in the world I kept from blowing that end of the house to the outer skirts of Mt. Vernon!
When I look outside in the fields and I see my kids playing with their friends like I used to it brings back all those recollections of some of the best times in my life with my girlfriends from all those years ago doing a lot of the things that my own kids do now. One day though I am going to show them the creek where I mastered the art of catching crawdads and treat myself to another reminder of the simpler times in my life.
A lot of things have changed since I was a kid walking through the halls of that house or running outside through those fields. But too, there are still so many things there that have so many special memories connected to them. I’d like to take the time someday to just slow down a little bit and appreciate more those souvenirs of yesterday that are taken for granted and overlooked far too much.
I think sometimes that it would be nice to have a new home, one with updated carpet, more than one restroom and a great big kitchen. But having all those things to me isn’t as important as what I have when I walk across a squeaky floor and it makes me smile or all the other wonderful rewards of living where I grew up. For now I think I will just cherish the blessing of home sweet home…just the way it is.
