Our house was built in 1898. It’s simple house, a style called Victorian Farmhouse. At less than 1000 square feet, with only two bedrooms and one bath, it’s cozy. It still has a dirt floor basement with a few small piles of coal that must have been used way back when. We lovingly refer to our humble abode as the “Urban Cabin.”
Big Papa painted the Urban Cabin a lovely shade of yellow. When I first met him and saw his house, which one day became our house, the fact that it was yellow helped Big Papa earn few extra Brownie points. The house I grew up in on the East coast was also yellow and I reserve a special place in my heart for yellow houses.
Today, the Urban Cabin got a facelift, in the form of a new front door. The old door has a finely toothed ‘dental shelf,’ and a mechanical doorbell. When you turn the ringer, it sounds like the bell I had on the Schwinn bicycle I rode back in high school. It’s got a lot of character, that old door.
Unfortunately, over its lifetime, the fit in the door jamb isn’t as tight as it once may have been. Cold air seeps through the cracks and street noise is easily heard through the single pane glass. Our neighborhood being what is sometimes referred to as “transitional,” the number of locks and chains that have been installed make it look a bit like Fort Knox. Still, Big Papa and I feel a certain sadness to see it go.
I imagine the hundreds of thousands of times a key was placed in its lock and a hand on its doorknob. I wonder, how many times did the loud brrring-brrring of the doorbell announce visitors? And, how many comings and goings has this door, and our house, seen? Surely many, many families have called these four walls home over the past 111 years.
Big Papa and I knew just three homes between us in our growing up years. I lived in the same house from the time my parents brought me home from the hospital until I left for college. My mother still lives there. Big Papa was four when he moved ten miles from house number one to house number two.
Our memories go deep to the homes of our childhoods. We learn every nook and cranny and every quirk. The floorboard that squeaks each time you walk over it, the secret hiding places we’re sure no one else knows about, or how you have to turn the top key to the left and the bottom key to the right to open the door. Your home becomes an extension of who you are. The one tree in the yard you climbed when you were mad at your parents. How, if you crook your head just so, you’ll catch a glimpse of clouds passing by. Sounds of cars or the music of crickets after the sun has set. It’s part of our very being, just like salmon who seek the stream of their birth.
In the (hopefully) not-too-distant future, we’ll be sharing the Urban Cabin with our wee one. It will be the first “real” home he’s ever known, no disrespect meant to the orphanage that cared for him the first months of his life. I wonder what memories he’ll make in the little yellow house. Whether he’ll laugh when, later in life, he tells of splinters received from old fir floors as he learned to crawl. Will green be his favorite color, because it reminds him of the room where he laid his head each night as a young pup? Right inside our front door, is a wood sign we got as a wedding present. “Love grows in small houses.” The Urban Cabin may be small in stature but I know it’s still got plenty of love left to give.