In the haze of clouds of pollen last week, I kept noticing the bodacious azaleas by our front porch. They show off just once a year, but wow, the show. Here we go again.... I thought of our first home. We had rented a couple of other houses before we finally bought our (to me) dollhouse. It was situated right by the railroad tracks in downtown Mableton in a little neighborhood of similar tiny bungalows, all under 1000 square feet. The yard was loaded with all sorts of random plantings and the house was the very definition of fixer-upper, before we even called them that. We paid $32,900 and thought we had won the lottery. My parents graciously allowed us to move in with them while we worked on it. We were pregnant with our first child, naive and full of can-do spirit. How little we knew...
We dove in with hammers and screwdrivers. By the time demo was done, you could see straight through to the other end of the house. As sick sheetrock and trim was pulled down, there were mountains of dead roaches and their leavings in the piles. It's a wonder we didn't swell up and die from all the toxins. Ken had never really done any type of construction, but he learned beside Daddy as we dug in. Ken was on evening shift at the plant, so he would work on the house in the morning and then head to his real job in the afternoon. When Daddy would get home from his day job, he and I and Mama would head to the fixer and work til late hours. Saturdays were marathons.
We yanked all the nasty cupboards out and laid them on the back patio, where I cleaned and sanded them. One day, Daddy and I were headed back to their home when he spied some cabinets just laying in some random person's yard. He slammed on the brakes and wheeled into their driveway. The guy gave us a kitchen's worth of those (also) nasty cabinets. We added them to the arsenal. These were even worse. Mama and I scrubbed, bleached and dried them, then set to sanding off the past. Ken and Daddy assembled them into our dreamy new home, leaving us with double the original amount of storage. I painted them a shiny cherry red and put on white porcelain knobs. There was an old, rusty light fixture in there that looked like for all the world like a farm lantern. I scrubbed (scrub and sand being the dominant theme in this renovation) and sanded it, painted the inside of it snow white and the outside the same red. I found some cheap wallpaper, white with yellow lines and red cherries. Mama made some red and white gingham checked curtains for the window. We put in laminate counters that looked like butcher block, and vinyl floors. It was smack-dab in the middle of the house and looked like a cottage belonging to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. We had to completely re-do the bathroom, using the cheapest materials we could find and using the original sink, tub and toilet. I wallpapered the hall and the main bedroom because the walls were so boogered up there was nothing else to do with them. There were two tiny closets in the whole house, ancient carpets that we couldn't afford to replace so we just cleaned them, and old pine paneling in the den that we degreased and shined. I painted the tiny nursery baby blue and painted lambs on the wall with scripture twined between them.
It was a mess. But it was our mess. With the help of family and friends (because there was no money), we scrubbed up this little place and made an adorable home for us and our upcoming baby. I had quit my job before we even started and before we got pregnant. There were people who criticized us for that. But I learned untold amounts of skills before our first baby even came...things that benefit us even to this day and that can't have a price put on them. Mama helped me learn to sew during those same days. I proudly put on my first maternity dress, made from my own hands. Painting, stripping furniture and cabinets, scrubbing, wallpapering, gardening, feeding my people...these are golden skills that have blessed my family and many others over my life.
I remember the weeks after we moved in, and everything was done, clean, serene, ready. The church and my family gave me a huge shower and we settled in to wait. I would spend warm mornings with my Bible in the backyard, in the swing that Ken's Pop had given us. The same swing that Ken played on, on his Grandmama's porch, when he was a child. I would put my hands around this burgeoning belly that contained an apparent Lamb of Great Size. I would talk to him, knowing he was a him even though we didn't get sonagrams back then. I sang to him, wondering what and who he would be. I saw in my mind's eye a man of God, strong and willful, a light in the darkness. We named him Jonathan (gift of God) Uriah (the fire of the Lord) -- because that's what he was going to be (and is).
Those sweet early days, misty and ethereal in my mind, difficult and yet simple. Happy, happy, unworthy and blessed beyond anything I could have imagined. People were often thinking we were crazy because we took roads less traveled. Then there was yesterday, Resurrection Day, where I sat in the middle of the years of progeny that have come. My favorite holiday, where church was rife with love and victory, grandchildren like flowers and bees and honey all buzzing. Noise, food, laughter, green grass and pollen, flowers and dirty little feet everywhere.
I was given two darling plates for Christmas -- one with our family tree on it, growing outward like a great oak. The other, a picture of the darling but big Victorian bungalow that we ended up with all these years later. It says: "For indeed, a house is a little church." The older I get, the more humbled I am as I realize that I don't get what I actually deserve and the God whom I love is merciful to His children. Simple dreams. A simple yet complicated life. Easter blessings. Open hands. A God greater than all our sin...
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