While I was away at college my sophomore year, my parents decided to move out of the house where we had lived for almost ten years to a larger house a few blocks down the street. I guess I went several weeks without going home and the whole buying the new house, selling the old house and moving in took place without any involvement by me.
I guess I didn't make it home until April of 1984. My parents gave me the address and when I showed up, I instantly recognized it. I had rung the doorbell once before when I was selling stuff for choir. A woman answered the door. I did the sales pitch. The woman said she didn't want anything and made a comment that she had been expecting someone else. I didn't know this at the time, but the people who lived there were very wealthy and very private. They wouldn't answer the door for anybody. The family had managed to strike oil right when the Great Depression hit, so they didn't experience the struggles that a lot of other people endured during the 1930s. Mom said the woman was about the age of my great-grandmother, but looked about 20 years younger because she lived so comfortably. That woman had to be put into a nursing home and her children sold the house.
It was a very large house. There were four bedrooms and a servant's quarters outside. There were two living rooms. Including the quarters, there were three full bathrooms and two half-bathrooms. It was really more house than the family needed. Years later, Dad said he didn't want to move from the old house, especially since Loyd was only a couple of years away from going to college, but Mom wanted to act like they were rich and live in a big house. However, Dad said he enjoyed the house a lot more after he installed a hot tub.
There were two bedrooms upstairs. Loyd got the large bedroom because he was living there. Loyd's room also had a balcony. My waterbed was put in the smaller room. It didn't matter, because I wasn't going to be spending much time there.
After everything we went through with the move from the country into town in 1974, I was glad I didn't have do a single thing with this move. I'll bet Mom, Dad and Loyd were about to tear each other apart if it was anything like the last move.
Even though the house was very nice, Mom and Dad still had to do some improvement. For starters, they had to replace the carpeting. The family had a dog that lived for 30 years. Toward the end of its life, it was constantly relieving itself on the carpet. It was stained and smelled. For some reason, they also had to replace the tile in the entry way.
One odd thing about the house was that the front door and the back door had separate addresses because they faced two different streets on the corner. However, I don't think we ever got mail delivered to the back door. The servant's quarters also had its own address. Once I asked Dad for some money to go do something. He asked the same question he had asked for more than a decade, "Do you think we're rich?" I responded, "Dad, we live in a house with three addresses. Yes, I think we're rich." He never asked that question again.
One nice thing about the house is that even though it was larger, the yard was not. It only took an hour to mow the lawn. It always took at least two hours with the old house. After Loyd and I had left, Mom and Dad had to work on the yard themselves. Mom was stuck with doing the edging while Dad used the riding lawn mower. He kept telling Mom that it was really hard to operate the mower, so that's why he didn't get her do it. One day, she said, "Let me try the mower," and she realized how easy and fun his part of the yardwork was. She always mowed the lawn after that.
But they didn't live in that house for very long. I'm not really certain what brought this about, but they sold the house in 1989 (a little more than five years after getting the big house) and moved into a smaller, two-bedroom home. It was a few months after that when Dad decided to leave Mom and file for divorce. The next time I saw him in Artesia, he was living in this run-down apartment. He had an agreement with the owner that he would make at least $100 in improvements every month if he got a $100 a month reduction in rent. It was very odd to see him kind of living like me after he had lived in some very nice dwellings, the kind of which I wouldn't get myself until last year.
That big house was nice, but I never considered it my home.
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