Familiar, Yet Not

I received a gift last Friday. While I was taking photos of the home where my family moved in 1964 when I was eight and where my mother lived until her death, I was invited  inside.

The “new” owner–who, it turned out, had bought the place from us in 1990–had done some nice things with the place. The walls all are painted in light colors rather than the enamel-dark-blue kitchen Mom was fond of, not to mention the orange bedroom (the one where the escaped convict awoke my sister, but that’s a whole other story). The kitchen cupboards are light wood rather than the darker pine we had, not to mention the one gray-brown door on one that Dad never got around to varnishing.

The main thing that struck me was just how small the place is. The front porch, three bedrooms, living room and dining room and what always struck me as the world’s largest kitchen likely have less square footage than the three-bedroom apartment I share today with my sister in Arlington. The “big” bedroom is smaller than our current office, even though we managed to get a set of bunk beds, a single bed, and a couple of chests of drawers in it. And there’s one bathroom, still no shower, compared to the three full baths we have in our apartment. I shook my head and wondered how six people–and for years, two of them teen-agers–managed to make that work.

The “new” owner is a friendly lady, but I couldn’t stay long. This old house on the north side of Sioux Falls was the place I grew up, the place I experienced a dozen Christmases, a dozen of my own birthdays and many more birthdays that belonged to my parents, sisters, brother, grandmother, and cousins. I baked dozens and dozens of cakes and cookies there, spent countless hours on the phone with Kathy, Vickie, Mary, Marcia, Mitch, and others. The traces of those memories are no longer in that house. But they will always be in my heart, no matter what changes come to 1025 N. Summit Ave.