Houses

Today I was busily cleaning house and getting things all shiny for the showing tomorrow.  It made me think of the house that Miranda Lambert sings about in her song "The HouseThat Built Me". She sings about the house she spent her childhood in, and she goes back to relive her childhood memories and the things that happened to her there that made her who she is. I love the song.

It got me thinking about all the houses I have lived in. The first house I remember living in was a great big old house on Tejon street in what is now downtown Colorado Springs. I only have hazy memories, flashes of a staircase and the wood in the house. I also remember that my brother Andy picked at the plaster in his room until he made a hole in the wall. I remember a picture of Lois and me in dresses standing on the porch of that house.

I next lived in a house in the brand new subdivision called Widefield, near Security in Colorado Springs. When we moved there, our house was one of the first houses built.  I remember it raining and flooding and tornado warnings. I remember filling the washing machine with water when it stormed, I guess to have fresh water. I remember my best friend Terri Hayes. We became friends in 2nd grade and remained friends into high school, even after I had moved, and then lost touch with one another. I remember raising our rabbits, mine was the one who had babies. I remember getting chicken pox with my brother and sister and my cousins Steven and Wendy. It was so hot. My mom and aunt Bonnie set up lounge chairs for us in our garage to lay on where it was cooler.  I remember the poppies my mom had planted out front, and I remember being afraid she was going to go to jail for growing them because somewhere along my road of growing up I learned that heroin came from poppies. I'm now fairly certain that wasn't the kind of poppies mom grew. I remember being little and my dad tied me to the close line with the sash on one of my dresses and made me feel like I was flying. We had a huge back yard, and in the bottom of it Lois, Andy and I along with our partners in crime Steven and Wendy dug a great big huge fort in the dirt. We spent so many hours in that dirt. We fought wars, played house, played wagon train and anything else we could think of. My first boyfriend lived across the street from us. His name was Darryl Kriner. I remember he was a hemophiliac (bled easily) and had to get infusions of plasma and blood transfusions. I often wonder what happened to him, there were so many who ended up with HIV or AIDS from all the blood products they received before there was testing for this. We "went steady". He gave me a ring made out of beads, and I treasured it as if it was a diamond. This is where I lived when I remember losing a pet. We had a dachsund named Cisco. His back went out and we had to have him put to sleep.  I remember mom and dad sent us outside to play so dad could sneak off to the vet with Cisco without us knowing. However, in true Cisco fashion, as dad drove by us outside he lifted his head and looked out the window as if to say goodbye to us. Dang dog.

When I was in 9th grade, we moved to Canon City, Colorado. I remember when we first went to see it. There were all these old people driving old cars, we called them Beaver Cleaver cars from the show Leave it to Beaver. We moved into a house in the country. We had an alfalfa field and an apple orchard. We lived next door to a dairy. They had a dog named Andy, and for a long time, we couldn't figure out why they were always yelling at my brother. We had a garden and black walnut trees and a circle driveway. I remember thinking that was pretty fancy. I worked next door at the dairy taking care of the calves. I LOVED that job. We lived in this house when my grandpa Tiffany died.  I was almost 16 when he died.  I remember he was the first person I loved who died (I was at least old enough for it to effect me). I had a pet goat named Cathy whom I adored. I bought and raised male calves from the dairy and sold them to my dad when they were ready to be butchered. The first time I fell in love I lived in this house. He knows who he is, so I won't say the name here, but we were crazy in love, only as teenagers can be. I remember "keggers" and "woodsies" (AKA beer parties) and bonfires. I remember Skyline Drive, a road the prisoners built that twists and turns atop a mountain above the old prison. Canon City is where most of Colorado's prisons are. I fell madly in love with a baby named Amy. She was a newborn baby whom I babysat for a year or so. I felt so important taking care of her. Of course she mostly slept when I was there, but I would go in her nursery and sit in the rocking chair and just watch her sleep. She was blonde and had blue eyes. I remember the huge bedroom Lois and I shared. We painted it the ugliest color of yellow, but at the time we thought it looked like sunshine. We always shared a bedroom when we lived at home.

In 11th grade I moved to Tehran, Iran. My dad had taken a job through the telephone company to be part of the team put together to install the phone system in Iran. We lived in an apartment. I remember feeling how strange it was to live somewhere that the people around you didn't speak your language. I remember being so horrified by the extreme poverty people lived in as much as I was fascinated with how rich the others lived. I remember the butcher shops with meat hanging outside in the heat with dried blood and flies on it. This is where my aversion to meat came from. I had a great friend there. Her name is Joy. We reconnected a couple years ago on Face Book. We were partners in crime. She had a boyfriend she was forbidden to have contact with because he was much older than she was. We traveled by cabs provided by the telephone company anywhere we went in Iran. Joy and I would call a cab and go to a fancy motel to mail her forbidden letters to Steve (by the way they are still married) and to buy our fancy cigarettes.  We also ditched a lot of school and hung out at Mexicali restaurant. Two of the waiters were quite taken with Joy and I, and we would spend the days there eating and flirting until we had to take a cab to our bus stop to make it look like we got off the bus with everyone else. We also used to go to a park that was by the Shah's castle and sit and smoke and laugh and giggle. By then I was dating her brother Patrick and their mom's name was Patty too. So we would talk about my boyfriend and she would tell me about the forbidden Steve. It all ended when the Shah's regime started falling apart and severe rioting and killing of Americans started. We all had to leave. No time to say goodbye to anyone. We were just lucky to be able to get on a plane to anywhere but Iran. I am still so thankful for the experience and very, very grateful to live in the United States of America.

When we got back to the states we lived in Pueblo for a while with my grandma until we got a place in Canon City so that Andy and I could finish school at Canon City High with our friends. When my dad returned to the states, he took a job in Grand Junction with the phone company. After I graduated my mom moved to Grand Junction and that fall I moved there to go to college. That was a bad time in my life. This was right after I had my abortion. I started nursing school, and my first rotation was labor and delivery. It nearly killed me. I remember seeing babies being born and longing for my own. I dropped out after a semester. About a year later I moved to Pueblo and lived with my grandma. I went to business school to become a secretary and later started working at Parkview Hospital where I worked for 17 years.

In 1996 I bought my first house. I was so proud that I did this all by myself. I was still single. I met Mel a couple months before I bought the house. He helped me move and put things back together in the new house. This is the place we fell in love. This is where he proposed to me. This is where we lived when we had Nicole. When Nicole was 3 we moved up the street five blocks to the house where I lost Mel. I fell so in love with that house. It was so beautiful and seemed so huge. Mel bought me a hot tub. We would soak in it in the middle of the night when it snowed. That was our favorite time. This is where we lived when Daniel came to us, another baby to love. This is where we lived when Mel was diagnosed with cancer, where I cared for him when he was ill, and where I eventually lost him. I don't know if I could ever walk back into that house. This summer when we went home I could hardly drive by it. Every once in a while someone will tell me they have driven by and how the new owners have changed it. I don't want to hear. I want to erase the bad things and go back there and relive the good years again.

In May 2011 the kids and I moved to our house in Odessa, WA, 10 weeks to the day after Mel died we arrived in Odessa. I still don't know how I managed that. I hated being here, I hated living here, I hated being anywhere that Mel wasn't. This is the house that has built me the most. This is the house I have lived in where I have ranted and raged at God for taking Mel from me. This is the house where I have laid curled up in a ball in the middle of the night, night after night, sobbing, begging God for my old life back. This is the house where I have had to learn to function again, at least on the surface. I have spent more time in bed in this house than I probably had the previous years in our old house. This is where I have laid at night curled up with a baby puppy in my arms and tearing streaming down my face in loneliness.  This is the house where we all three sleep in the same bedroom. I have gotten a lot of unasked for advice about how to remedy this situation. I figure they won't still be sharing a room with me when they get married so I'm not too worried about it. We still feel better if we are all together, especially at night. This is the house where my faith in God has been tested over and over and over again. This is the house where I have argued over and over and over again with God about not wanting to be here. This is the house where God has taught me so many things. He has taught me that He didn't take Mel from me as punishment. He took Mel home to live in Glory with Him until he comes again. This is the house where I have learned to laugh again and where I have started to trust God again. The time I have spent here has been a real spiritual journey for me, and God had the exact people in place here that He knew I would need before I even knew they existed. My Christian sisters Lynn, Kerry, Faye, Michelle, Merleen, Vici, Wendy. They have held me and loved me through so many emotions and changes and questions and doubts and fears. He put us next door to a wonderful couple who has loved us like family, second grandparents to my kids and sounding boards for me. He put me here with family to rely on when I need help or a place to go when it's lonely. So I believe that this is really the house that built me, because God has put me here to "build me" into the person I am today. I still miss Mel, I always will.  I still don't understand why he couldn't have been cured here on earth, and I never will. I still get angry when I think of my kids not growing up with their daddy, and I always will. But this is really where my spirituality has been tested and grown more than any other time or place in my life, and for that I am thankful.

I first wrote this several months ago. It is now December 28, 2012. A lot has happened since this started. A few weeks ago my dad called me. He told me he wanted to start looking for us a house in Pueblo even though our Odessa house hasn't sold yet. I told him no, he told me yes, I told him no and told him I could not ever ask him to do that. He told me I hadn't asked but he had. He told me he didn't care what anybody else thought about his decision. He told me he is 75 years old and doesn't have that much time left to live, and the time he does have left he wants to live it with my children close to him (maybe me too). He told me he had even considered that maybe it would be best for us to be in Washington when he dies so that Nicole and Daniel wouldn't have to witness losing him. He asked me if I thought he was selfish. I told him no. I told him that my greatest desire was for my children to be near their grandparents again. I guess it takes being a grandparent to know the joy of actively participating in your grandchildren's lives. My kids are the only grandchildren my parents have ever had the opportunity to live near. So it comes to a full circle. Today a house is being bought for my family, about 2 miles from my parents home. Next week we start packing up, and then I move across country again for the 2nd time in less than 2 years. I am excited but I am also sad. I will miss my family and friends in Odessa, but I hope to remain a part of their lives. Facebook is a wonderful place. I love you all and wouldn't have missed being in Odessa for anything. God really does have a purpose for everything in life. There was a purpose in me being here, I have a whole new "circle of friends" whom I will love for life. Thank you, all of you for taking care of us this past year and a half.