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Sometimes, One Can Go Home Again by Nancie Mooney |
When I remember my childhood days, I think of our beloved family homestead: the house, the yard, the woods, and the river. My two sisters and I spent a lot of time playing out of doors, as there was no television in our home until I was about eleven years old.
Our homestead consisted of three acres of land, including a huge yard, fields and woods that went from the street back to the Wading River. The back yard contained an apple orchard. A huge arbor, covered with old-fashioned roses, and a wide archway divided the back yard from the side yard. There were all the gardens: the rock garden, the iris garden along the grape arbor, and loads of phlox and other old-fashioned flowers everywhere. There were lilac bushes and Rose of Sharon bushes, and wonderful, huge maple trees to shade us as we played.
When we weren’t playing in the yard around the house, we’d be exploring the woods or playing games with the neighbor kids out in the field. I remember well the time when I was about seven years old, and having found some matches, decided to see if I could build a little campfire in the field. I remember the flames quickly spreading their orange glow in ever widening circles, and my feelings of panic when I heard the fire engine sirens screaming up our street. I hid in an upstairs closet, knowing I was in big, big trouble. Hiding did no good - and yes, I was in big, big trouble!
The house is a turn-of- the century cottage style home, with wonderful Craftsman touches - rich woodwork, maple hardwood floors, and beamed ceilings. There was a large open kitchen, with a butler’s pantry off to the side. (We never had the butler - but we had the pantry!) Our family room, which we called “the den,” was a multi-windowed room overlooking the side and back yards. It was a beautiful room, with rich, dark wood paneling, reminding one of an English country manor. It was in that room our piano resided, and I learned to play the hymns of my faith. The family dining room was bright and cheerful, with three huge windows forming a rounded curve on one side of the room. It was from these windows, late in the day, we’d begin to watch for Dad’s car to come around the bend in the road - and the first one to see the car yelled, “Daddy’s home!”
There is a sun porch across the front of the house - a long, narrow room with windows covering every exterior wall. It faces west, and in the late afternoon, I’d take a book to read, or my paper dolls to cut, and go climb on the daybed out there, and it was a wonderful, cozy space. The setting sun cast shadows of branches and leaves which danced around the room. There is no heat on the porch, so it is only occupied for pleasure when the weather is warm.
There are three large bedrooms at the top of the beautiful staircase. My older sister, Suzie, had the back bedroom, our younger brother, Vic, had a room, and my younger sister, Cynthia, and I shared the bedroom that faces west to the setting sun. It is a large room with slanted ceilings, cozy nooks, and beautiful windows with English argyle pattern windowpanes on the top, and pull open shutters. Cynthia moved to Suzie’s room when Suzie went off to Nursing School in New York, and that wonderful room became all mine.
I was the first of the children to marry and permanently leave the Norton house. Carlos and I married in 1964, two years after I graduated from Norton High School. Carlos had accepted his first Pastorate in Oswegatchie, New York, and we moved into our first parsonage. There was never a day, from then until last summer that I didn’t carry the warmth of the old homestead in my heart. I also carried photos of it, as well as a big painting done by my mother, of the house as it looked when we were children. This home became my anchor as we moved from church to church, living in homes that were not our own.
My family continued to live in that house until Dad’s work took him to Long Island, and they sold the house in 1978. Even after we moved back to New England in 1990 and were finally able to buy our own home, we wished we could have bought my family house - it was definitely within commuting range to both of our churches in Rhode Island, but it was never on the market.
Fast-forward to 2004. We received an e-mail from my brother, who still lives in Norton, informing us that our old homestead, still owned by the couple to whom our parents sold it, had just come on the real estate market. Immediately I made an appointment with the agent. My mother and I returned to Norton, and spent well over an hour at the house. The real estate agent patiently listened to all of our stories. We told her we had once lived in the house, and we knew every nook and cranny. At first she thought we were simply doing a nostalgia trip. I thought so too - for the first thirty seconds!
I went back to Rhode Island, and said to my best friend, my husband, “Honey, I want to go home.” The price of the house was, for us, seemingly astronomical, and I expected him to say, albeit sympathetically, “I’m sorry - we can’t afford it.” Instead, he responded “If we can, we will!”
From that moment on, everything fell into place beautifully. We were pre-approved by the bank for the asking price, and our offer on the house was accepted. Within a month, the closing occurred, and we moved back to the family homestead in August of 2004.
There have been changes: the kitchen is now fully equipped, and the butler’s pantry is now a mud room. But the living room still has the white woodwork, and the bright red print wallpaper chosen by my mother thirty-five years ago. The lovely plaid carpet she had installed in the den is still here, too, and a woodstove has been added to the room. The apple orchard is gone, as are the rose arbors. But the maple trees remain, and the property is still fully intact. Carlos loves to ride around the yard on his lawn tractor, surveying his estate, just the way my father used to do.
There are no words to describe the joy and contentment I feel being here. With my retirement only a few months away now, the twenty-two mile commute through Providence is quite bearable. And recently, we moved my mother to live with us, here in the place that was her home for thirty years.
I believe this whole move was by the hand of God. I am thrilled to know my mother will spend her last years here, and my remaining years will be spent in the place I’ve always loved and called home. There are some ghosts here - memories that are not so sweet and lovely. God has graciously helped me to live peaceably with them, as each difficult memory is handed over, and placed away in God’s own attic. I focus on the happy times, and all the rest fades into the shadows. This is the place of my heart, and as I continue to minister in my retirement years, I always feel a thrill when it is time to go home.
Nancie Mooney is Pastor, Lakewood Baptist Church, Cranston, RI.