Our First House

Note: I wrote this a few weeks ago for fun when I assigned this topic to my memoir writers.

I wonder if we would have bought that house if we had known we would leave it less than a year later. And what was our motivation? It wasn’t that we had had a child. Our townhouse was big enough for the three of us and our fairly large dog. It wasn’t that we both had full-time jobs and were flush with cash. Just the opposite was true. We had budgeted for the monthly payments and knew we could make the changeover from rent to mortgage because the difference was minimal, but we did not have the money for down payment, a down payment that had to be our own money, not a loan.

Our motivation? Was it because we didn’t want to raise our child in an apartment? Was it that we thought we were settled in Decatur, GA for a while longer while Paul finished his dissertation at Emory? Did we want a yard for our dog? Did we just get the so-called “bee in the bonnet”? Oh, our decision to buy probably had a bit of all of those ideas in the mix.

Nevertheless, by the time Jonathan, our child, was about 14 months old, we were moving into our brand-new ranch style house. Built in a new hilly subdivision, with about four to six designs, we were some of the first owners on our street, a street which was just being built-up on one side, not the other. Our house was green vertical wood siding with a panel of field stone next to the front door, which opened into a small hall with an immediate opening on the left into the tunnel-style kitchen and spilling into the great room straight beyond. In between, on the right-hand side was the hall that led to three bedrooms, two smaller ones on the right, the bath and master bedroom with half-bath on the left.  

Within no time, we had turned that house into our home—with nothing new in it—we just moved our townhouse furniture into the house. I scoured the fabric outlet stores to find fabric that I could make into drapes for the large deck door that opened to the back of the great room—no vertical blinds were included with the low-budget house. Then I found fabric to outline quilt a bedspread and drapes for the master bedroom. I have no idea what I did with the nursery and the study. Perhaps we just used what we had.

What I hadn’t planned for was Christmas. We had no money for anything for Christmas. Everything was budgeted somewhere else. I was so sad. I thought that Jonathan might be old enough to remember something of this Christmas, when he would be 16 months old. How could we have Christmas without a tree? At some point I became obsessed with having some kind of Christmas tree.

Most days of the week, I would bundle Jonathan into his umbrella stroller and the two of us would go out our front door, turn right and run up the hilly, curvy street till it dead ended into the trash heap of the construction site. Then we would turn around and race down the other side. Nothing had been cleared on that side of the road, so I could see all kinds of pine trees lining the hills.

My mind began to race with the stroller: I could cut down a pine tree for our Christmas tree. Now, obviously, I could not cut down a large tree; I wouldn’t have the strength to do that. But a small tree, perhaps I could manage that. Now, mind you, my obsession somehow blocked my mind from thinking about the fact that the tree would be on private property, especially since the owner was the construction company that would just clear most of the large trees and all the small trees when they began to divide up the land into house lots.

The next day, when Jonathan I went out for our run, I was armed with a saw. I cut short our right-hand side run and moved directly to the left side of the road, scouring the landscape for the perfect small tree. Where were all these dream trees? Perhaps I had dreamed them because all I could find were trees too large or too small, rather like Goldilocks trying the bears’ belongings. I looked and looked, finally finding a two-foot sapling that I knew I could easily cut down. But when I got close to it, I realized that one side of it was almost totally bare of branches—that just would not do. Finally, I spotted another two-footer, and cut down both of them.

Back home, after Jonathan had been fed and put down for a nap, I tackled the idea of two trees. By the end of two hours, I had lashed the two together to make a quite respectable mini-tree. I found a sturdy box, covered it with red Christmas wrapping paper, and set the tree made of two saplings on top of it. In no time at all, a string or two of lights and the best of our Christmas ornaments were hanging on the tree. At any other time, I would probably have been embarrassed to showcase such a sorry tree, but the determination of a new mother to have a tree for her only child overcame any embarrassment: that was the best tree ever.

Oh, there are other memories of that first house of ours, including hiding all of Jonathan’s pacifiers in a cookie jar on a second shelf in the kitchen cabinet and telling him he could have any pacifier he could find, knowing he couldn’t ever find them. And the Saturday night babysitter’s arrivals after Jonathan was already in bed so that we could go out on our Sunday paper route while he slept.  And the Chinese food take-out dinners shared with our near neighbors who also had a one-year-old son.

But none of those memories can top my memory of our first—and only—Christmas tree in that house. And it’s only a memory—I have no pictures to prove it ever existed. And Jonathan can’t remember it; he was still too young!