Don’t Make Me Leave Hastings

Just an hour ago, the sun was shining on my back while I painted the window frames. In the distance I could see the fog coming our way off Lake Superior and wished I’d started painting earlier. Now we’re enveloped and I hope it doesn’t rain. I love painting our house up here, scraping old paint, putting on primer, having the perfect coffee can to hold my paint and a new brush.

And no sound except for far-off voices I think are coming from a sailboat just off shore. Maybe not.

A few months ago, I went to Hastings to visit my parents’ graves and do the annual stewing about their urn and what I should plant in it. Part of the visit always entails homage to the house my father built. Not every Sears appliance salesman can build a house but he did.

The story goes like this. It was 1949. My family lived in another small Michigan town, Hudson, where I had been born the year before. My father owned a Western Auto Store on the downtown strip and we all, my parents, brother and sister and me, lived in a big, old boxy house my parents had bought and fixed up, as they say.

One day, my father went to the Chamber of Commerce meeting where the members voted down a plan to lure Tecumseh Corporation to town; other merchants were fearful of the traffic and competition for labor, didn’t want their town taken over by outsiders. So the vote was no.

My father told the tale like this. He went back to his Western Auto Store and fumed all afternoon. Why turn away progress, he asked. A big company meant more workers which meant more people fixing their cars which meant more business for him. Idiots, he said, all of them.

Late in the afternoon, a man walked in, took his time wandering through the store, looked at this and that, and finally approached my father and asked, “Would you ever consider selling?”

And, as he told the story to me many times, he responded quickly and affirmatively. “Absolutely, ready to sell. What’s your offer?” Then, thinking he could sweeten the deal by offering the out-of-towner a place to live, he quickly added his house, our house, to the deal. “I’ll sell you both for…”

Then he went home and told my mother that despite how he looked when he walked out the door that morning, much like he looked on any morning, the events of the day had convinced him to sell everything and move.

The next step for him had to be a good one. So he moved us back to my mother’s home town and promised to build her a new house.

He rented horses and a plow or whatever one would use to dig the foundation. He framed the house, built it out, finished it, painted it. Oh, I’m sure that he had a plumber and electrician. Sort of sure. All these years later, it’s still a pretty little house. If you saw it, you would never imagine that a salesman built it.

When he poured the driveway, he put my little hands in the wet cement. The handprints were there for years when I would go back to visit and then one year, they were gone, paved over.

I’d like to say that we were happy there. There were tulips along the side of the garage and a rope swing he made that hung from a tall tree in the backyard. My sister took tap dancing lessons at Crystal Kate’s and marched in the 4th of July Parade. My brother played the drums in the high school marching band. My mother was the Campfire Girls leader, did wash on Monday, ironed on Tuesday and watched the Army McCarthy Hearings on TV. She gave me a nickel wrapped in a hankie to buy a popsicle at the corner store two blocks away and I sang Found A Peanut on the bus to go swimming at Gun Lake. My father sold washing machines at Sears and played in dance bands at night, sometimes taking my brother with him when his drummer bailed out. He started saving money right away for another store.

Which he bought eight years later in a different city so the house he built was sold. And nothing was ever the same again.

We loved our house, our street, our town. We loved the high school band and the parades. Everything was fine there. My handprints were on the driveway.

Leaving was unbelievable and tragic for all of us except my father. The rest of us, my mother, brother, sister and I, fell into a deep and silent grief about our loss of place that never lifted and we never discussed. The new house seemed like a room at the inn, not our home, just a place to stay. We had left our hearts in the house my father built for us. But his life was about wanting success not about a house or a place.

You can always get a new place. I can hear him saying that.

But I don’t believe it. I love this place. I love the frames around the windows I just painted. I love the fog that will make the paint sticky even through tomorrow. I can’t imagine ever selling this house and driving away in my car.

I never want to miss a place again like I missed the house my father built.