It was an e-mail from my sister. The news was good. We had sold my mother’s house at a fair price, considering the myriad problems that Joan just didn’t want to deal with in her later years: leaky basement, peeling paint, and light fixtures in the living room that went on and off on their own. No light switch necessary. Kinda creepy, really.

No matter. Now they’re someone else’s problems. And it’s someone else’s dream home. That’s hard to get my head around.

Regardless of its condition, Mom had loved the little ranch house at 41 Lakeview Road for 56 years. Friends counseled her for almost a decade that at her age (she would have been 90 next year), it would be easier to live in a condominium or a retirement home. She bristled at both, dedicated to living her final days in the same place where she had raised her three children. She never expressed it quite that way, but the thought of someone else in her house, I am quite sure, would have been too much for her to bear. My last memory of Mom is her standing at the kitchen window, where she surveyed the neighborhood activities for more than half a century.

Mom and Dad purchased the house in l951 for 30 grand, a hefty price in those days. It must have been particularly gratifying for my dad who had returned from Japan where he served during the war, pretty sure my Mom was going to marry someone else in his absence. Thankfully, she didn’t.

Maybe it was the 100 letters my dad wrote to romance her—more than a few of which were hastily, but meticulously, scribed in pencil from fox holes, often right before or after a skirmish with the enemy. Just before Mom died, she sent me all the correspondence, each piece in its original envelope, then placed in tiny stacks based on where Arnie was stationed at the time. A few were secured in a separate pile labeled: “Special.”

I read every one. My dad, never known for his oratory, wrote a mean love letter—mean in the nicest and newest sense of the word. But they were romantic in the old sense of the word. Not a breath about a physical yearning for my mom, and, in fact, Joan swore that prior to marriage their relationship was extremely…shall we say, Victorian. Without giving you more information than you want, I will say that Joan, who later in life developed a bit of a salty tongue and a fondness for a good off-color joke, always referred to my birth in l947—exactly nine months after she and my dad were married—as beginners’ luck.

Now our first house belongs to a new family. They’re strangers to me; they’re people I had no chance to meet, or pass judgment on, before they would start their new lives on our little dead-end street in suburban New York.

My mother was born just three miles from where my brother and sister and I were raised. Joan always had a sense of ownership for the two-story colonial house in which she grew up. Over the years, whenever the house was sold to a new family, Mom would doll herself up, drive across town, knock on the door, and proudly tell the new owners that she lived in that very house in the 1920s and ’30s.

I’m sure that the young couples who listened patiently to her reminiscences might have thought she was just a crazy old lady. But Joan, for all quirks, had a sense of history. No matter who lived at 119 Paine Avenue, it would always still be her house.

And that’s the way I feel about 41 Lakeview Road.

Add a comment at www.rushvillerepublican.com.