The Life of a House

There was an old farm-house that once sat on Fort Avenue in Springfield, Missouri. It didn’t fit the structural style of the nearby ranch homes constructed around it in the 1970s and 80s, so it was likely the home of the family who previously farmed the land before the area was developed. It was a two-story wood-framed home with a small front porch. It was clear no one lived there nor had for awhile. The house sat dark and cold.

Every time I drove past this house, I thought of the life that once filled it. How it kept a family dry during the spring rains. How a mother snuggled her young child in an upstairs bedroom on an autumn evening before turning out the lights. The many warm holiday celebrations held in the home for beloved family and friends. Celebrants gathered, singing Christmas songs with a beverage in hand, the united voices uncontained by the plaster and siding. This house once held space for its occupants when they grieved the loss of a loved one or birthed a new life into the world. The grassy green yard hosted games of baseball, tag, and hide-and-seek. The warmth, laugher, and love that once filled the corners of every room seemed to ooze out of the broken windows, evaporating away. There is a reason why empty houses fall into decay so quickly: there is no love to keep them standing.

This house was demolished sometime between 2007 and 2009. The placeholder for the lives that once occupied that home wiped away. Google Street View of the property shows it hasn’t been redeveloped. All that is left is an empty parcel.

Do we really give houses the gratitude they deserve? They are our basecamp, the place we always know we can return to from our adventures out in the world. They provide warmth, shelter, and safety for those we hold dear. Homes hold our memories and stories and tell them in a mark on the wall or the squeak of a floorboard. A house can hold a family’s history and be a stable nucleus for the generations that grow up in its walls. A place where everyone comes back and again to congregate, share, and love.

Recently, the house my great-grandparents built-in 1908 was sold. This 4-bedroom, 2.5 bath home was the place 5 generations of my family lived, laughed, and loved together. We celebrated nearly 70 Thanksgivings with our cousins in the dining room, opened gifts for over 100 Christmases in the living room, and prepared nearly 41,000 meals in the kitchen (yes, I did the math). My grandmother and all of her siblings were born in that house and at least one person (my great grandmother) was laid out there so people could pay their last respects.

The last Thanksgiving we celebrated there was in 2019. More than 30 family members remembering, laughing, crying, and commemorating what we all knew would be our last Thanksgiving in that sacred place. At one point, I felt like all the Thanksgivings that had ever been celebrated there were intersecting. As if all the generations of my family that knew that home were there in some way to join in one last big party across time.

Thankfully, the house has a new family to fill it with love. It will not meet the empty fate of the house on Fort Avenue, at least not now. While that house is no longer the nucleus for my family, I am thankful for all the years it held us within its boundaries and grateful that a new family will love it into the future.