2009-03-23

House

I took a little trip back to the house where I spent my "formative years." I didn't physically head to the South Shore, didn't take that left before the old police station, didn't pass my sister's elementary school. No, I just googled the address and came to a real estate agent's site. Said agent has simply never bothered to remove the listing, even though the house was sold almost 2 1/2 years ago.

The house was described in that ridiculously enthusiastic and relentlessly fuckin' chipper language employed by real estate agents.

Located in an area where many homes are being updated - prox to the bay, schools, shopping, and the Hingham commuter boat!

"Updated" here meaning "torn down." When my family moved in back in 1980, the neighborhood was full of wee little bungalows that had been more or less winterized. Our own house had once been one of these bungalows -- it had just been very, very hastily and not-quite-professionally turned into a "colonial." The floorboards on the second story sagged alarmingly in spots. The whole place seemed to groan in protest at all hours of the night.

The last time I went to the house, to retrieve the last of my folks' belongings, most of these amazing Depression-era bungalows were long gone, replaced by ridiculous, soulless McMansions squeezed into preposterously small lots.

Open floor plan includes foyer, family room and formal living which is just great for entertaining and a play area for the children.

Floor plan also includes perilously low ceilings and "rustic" beams that my father -- 6'4" -- never did get used to. And the "play area," at least when my sister and I were kids, was the abandoned naval airport landing strip back in the woods (this, unsurprisingly, is also gone, "developed" - not into a park or a nature preserve - but into gargantuan, ugly-assed condominiums that I believe are only about 50% occupied.).

Spacious eat-in kitchen with conv 1st flr laundry.

I can count on one hand the number of times we actually "ate-in" that kitchen. We weren't exactly a sit-down-to-eat kind of family. Too much going on: play rehearsals, cheerleading practice, my dad's overnight shift. I confess that I am just about the rudest person with whom you could dine. As an "adult," I do sit at my table to eat now, but I've usually got a magazine or a book in front of me. And believe me, this is a vast improvement - I used to eat in front of the television. Maybe the people who live there now are different. I try to imagine them in that kitchen, sitting at a table devoid of school projects and unfolded laundry. I can't grasp such a scenario. It boggles the mind.

Master Bedroom 2nd Floor, 21x11, Wall to Wall Carpet

This was my brother's room. He got the biggest room, I believe, because we moved in the middle of his freshman year at Stanford and this was therefore to be some kind of consolation prize for him, much like his getting to name me after 8 years of being an only child.

Bedroom 2 2nd Floor, 11x13, Wall to Wall Carpet

This was my parents' bedroom. It was all done up in gold, neo-Baroque wallpaper. It was connected to my brother's room by what my sister and called "The Brady Bunch Bathroom." It was more or less understood that The Brady Bunch Bathroom was pretty much my brother's bathroom. Everybody else went downstairs.

Bedroom 3 3rd Floor, 11x10, Wall to Wall Carpet

My room. Awful blue shag carpeting and wallpaper with toy soldiers all over it. I was OK with this at 10; by the time I was in high school it was covered in Bauhaus and U2 posters. This was also the room in which I would scribble away in those now semi-infamous diaries. In later years this would become my mother's "work area" and was choc-a-bloc with dollhouses in various states of completion.

Bedroom 4 2nd Floor, 10x10, Wall to Wall Carpet

My sister's room. Daisy wallpaper that would later be defaced by various proclamations of love for various boyfriends.

What a crazy place this was. Always full of people, always full of stuff, never enough room for any of it. It would fill with ants in the summer, and the bedrooms were never quite warm enough in the winter. But it was, for all that, my home. My sister and I, navigating the perilous waters of adolescence, threw tampons into the upstairs bathtub to watch them expand, screaming in terror as they did so. I studied my lines, and everyone else's, in my tacky little bedroom. You know -- I remember our first night in that house almost to the nanosecond. We had dinner on the living room floor in front of the television -- Frosted Mini-Wheats. I have nowhere near that kind of recall in terms of the "first nights" anywhere else I've lived. Here's my sister and brother in the living room on the evening of her prom:

Real estate agents can't sell this shit. They can sell proximity to schools and shopping. They can sell fixer-upper opportunity to someone who might want to take on some of those floorboards. It's funny to see someone try to sell what simply cannot be just an empty house. They will fill it with expectations and promise. But the other stuff is still there.

lisamcc at 6:35 p.m.



3 comments so far
Tina
2009-03-25 00:41:20
I laughed so hard when I read this... and teared up a bit. The only bit you forgot was that my room was the ONLY one without heat and I froze my ass off every single winter if my door was even a teeny bit closed. Brrrrrr. Those Peter Pan blankets did NOT keep me warm.
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Toddlington
2009-03-25 03:41:16
Why are the ceilings so low? Was it built in 1521 when people were shorter? By a visionary Medieval architect channeling the 1950s? I mean, like, SO low!
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melissa mayo-williams
2009-03-26 15:34:57
there were some good CCD classes in that house..
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