My House on Cedar Avenue
By: Mandy Osterhaus Ream
Tags: Gifts, Prompt, Home, Parenting, Self

My House on Cedar Avenue

One of the greatest gifts my parents gave me and then took away.

My house on Cedar Avenue. Photo by Marcy Osterhaus.

There is a house in Virginia where I used to live. It is a place I often dream about even though I left it 37 years ago.

It was a great gift, this house.

In 1975, when I was three, my young parents thought it would be romantic to buy a Civil War-era farmhouse. After some searching, they found a dilapidated structure, surrounded by shrubs so high a passer-by couldn’t see the windows. Ivy and bushes nearly strangling the back of the house.

The house on Cedar Avenue.

It is family lore that on the day my grandmother first saw the house while visiting from Chicago, she cried, noting the dining room wall didn’t meet the floor and she could see through to the backyard.

But my parents had a vision and a lot of naïve friends, many of whom were graduate students, willing to learn the skills needed to restore and rebuild the house. With one hand holding a “Do-it-Yourself” book on carpentry and one hand ready with a hammer, they got started.

In the early days of our life there, I slept in the living room and my parents slept in the dining room, the stairs too precarious to navigate. One Easter-eve I lay staring at the front door, certain this was where the Easter bunny would make his entrance.

My mom, with artistic flair, painted three glass panes above the front door and wallpapered my ceiling with an array of patterns, hiding shapes for me to discover during naptime. I was an only child then, my first brother on his way a few years later when my parents realized they were both pregnant and out of money.

During the humid Virginia summers, I slept upstairs in the hallway beneath an over-worked airconditioning unit until my parents had enough money to install central air.

Sometimes I danced in front of the little cabinet under the stairs where a turntable played Jim Croce albums.

If I could save time in a bottle.

I marveled at the musty dirt-walled storm cellar that added character to the house and not much else. My parents kept the apothecary bottles unearthed when my dad dug up an old well that was too close to the back door and he was afraid I would fall in. I even had an archaeological experience of my own when I dug up pieces of old pottery in our yard. I was certain they were at least as old as our 150-year-old house.

I loved this place.

I loved the sound of water running through the floor heaters that created a haunting effect in the winter. I loved the windows that came to the floor in my tiny room, where I could sit and watch the rain on boring Saturday afternoons. I enjoyed showing off the Lincoln-esque stovepipe hat found in a corner somewhere when we first moved in. I played for hours on the tire swing hanging from a skyscraper-tall evergreen tree. Behind an old chicken-coop-turned-shed grew an overgrown blackberry bush my uncle would forage every summer.

I loved the winding brick pathways constantly upended by burrowing gophers. I even took pride in the azaleas scattered throughout the yard.

This was not a big place. But it had nooks and creaks and I loved it.

When friends came for dinner, I often heard the story about the exposed beams in the living room that my dad carefully excavated from a crumbling ceiling. I loved telling new guests about the primitive insulation of horsehair and newspaper my parents discovered inside the walls when they remodeled the kitchen.

Sometimes my dad shared his motivation for the whole construction project, to redeem a crappy middle school interaction with a shop teacher who threw my dad’s assignment in the trash in front of his classmates.

I rocked on the porch swing half-hidden by large boxwoods that framed the front porch. I ran around the house to greet my grandparents at the front door of the attached cottage my dad built for them to live in every May through October, when they migrated, bird-like, from Florida.

The six months each year when my grandparents lived with us were filled with baking and sewing and listening to my grandfather rage at the squirrels rummaging in the bird feeders.

My grandmother and I sometimes sat on the steps and stringed the beans grown in our garden boxes. And her living room was so close to the piano where I practiced that when she heard my first notes, she would come to sit on the bench and count out loud as I played. It was excruciating.

This was home.

And then we moved to California.

Although it was explained to me in terms of opportunity, God calling, and adventure, I could not fathom why we were leaving this place that didn’t just house our family but held our stories, our memories, our identity. My 14-year-old self was ready to bid my parents and young brothers farewell and live with my childhood friend, Meaghan.

Young teenagers don’t have much power in these moments. This move, like so many others for so many people, is life-altering. And I know life-altering isn’t always bad.

The twists and turns my family and I have taken since this first move include half of us living in California and half of us living just miles from our old house. And I’m one of the Californians.

I now have kids of my own. We live in a house without a tire swing or mysterious storm cellar, but it is a home I cling to with the anxiety of my younger self, determined to let the roots we’ve put down here grow deep. And I see the naivety in my determination because I know that I can’t know the future.

But as I continue to carry the memories of my Cedar Avenue house, passing a picture of it every day in my home, I am reminded of the words said and unsaid about our leaving it. This guides how I attempt to explain life to my boys, explanations that I hope give them deeper layers of understanding when we adults make certain decisions. I honor the confusion they might experience when they can’t see what I can see.

I visit Virginia once or twice a year now. And when I’m there, I drive down Cedar Avenue. There have been a few different owners of our house but each one has kept the original Williamsburg color scheme my parents selected. There have been new additions and changes, but the bones are the same.

I knocked on the door once years ago and a gracious woman let me wander a bit. I haven’t been inside for a long time but every time I’m on my street, I slow down and look. I imagine the people inside are a little suspicious.

But if the owners ever come out and ask, I will say, “I’m sorry to bother you, but my parents created this. It was a great gift.”