Our last Houston house we rented before we bought The Compound was just down the street from Lynne’s home in the suburbs. Like our previous house, the view from the front made it look deceptively small. We stepped through the front door into a large great room/dining room with cathedral ceilings. To the far left was a set of stairs that led to a landing that overlooked the living area. Off that landing were two large bedrooms joined by a bathroom.
Downstairs, the dining room was separated from the large kitchen by a bar. Turning to the right, we walked through a vanity area with a bathroom on the left. Passing through that, we were in the huge master bedroom with a giant walk-in closet. I LOVED that closet, because it held all our clothes and a a ton of other stuff, so the upstairs closets were relatively empty. I think I did eventually move my clothes to a walk-in closet upstairs because I used that bathroom so Tom and I could get ready for work in the mornings without getting in each other’s way.
A door led from the dining room into the garage, where our washer and dryer were. I don’t know how long we lived there–a long time–before we realized that the automatic garage door with its two remote controls actually DID work. It just needed to be plugged in. That was an exciting day after months and months of hefting that stupid door up to take the cars in or out.
Some more things I remember about living there:
The backyard backed up to a bayou, so there was nothing directly behind us except wildlife. However, from our upstairs windows, we could see into the backyards of three neighbors. On one side of us, we never saw our neighbors. But next to their yard, we could see the potbellied pig who lived back there. That thing was HUGE. But it never caused any trouble. Our neighbors on the other side, however… They had two kids, and they’d toss them in their backyard, where the decibel levels would rise to alarming heights. The bedroom I used as my office overlooked that yard, and one day when I was writing, the kids’ screams got so loud that I began to wonder if something was wrong–like maybe there was a snake in their yard or something. Just as I got up to look out the window, their father came out of the house without a stitch of clothes on to yell at them and threaten to whip them. My eyes, my EYES! There are some things I can never unsee no matter how much I wish I could.
As you can see from Stevie posing here, our backyard was pretty big. Certainly big enough for two dachshunds to run and play. This was the house we lived in when I took Stevie out late one night so she could have a final potty break before bed, and as we stood there, this ENORMOUS thing flapped past me, swooping toward Stevie. I had no idea that the wing span of an owl was that vast. Fortunately, the owl decided Stevie was a little too big to be prey, or else my crazy arm waving and hyperventilating startled it, because it went back up without bothering the dog. Stevie never even knew it happened.
There was also a nice patio just outside the sliding glass doors of the kitchen. We sat out there a lot when weather allowed. This is our grand-nephew Dave being held by his mother when they stayed with us while driving through Houston once.
We used to travel more at Christmas, though I’ve always loved being home for the holidays. We must have planned to be away the Christmas of this photo–probably 1993–so we didn’t put up a big tree, just the tiny one that I use for my Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus display. I loved the hearth and the fireplace in this house, and that’s where Tom’s sitting with all the presents and Stevie and Pete in his arms.
I wish I had a photo of the room I used for my office, because that’s where we had the daybed that Lynne made all the pillows and bedding for. But I do have a photo of the guest room.
When we moved there, we still had Steve R’s cats that we inherited after he died. They had the run of the upstairs, and we put a child gate at the top of the stairs so the dogs couldn’t bother them. This is Emily lying on one of the guest room beds. Maggie died while we were living in that house, and we buried her in the woods nearer Lynne’s house in the dead of night, with Lynne, Jess, Tom, and me to mourn her. She had a good long life–I think she was nineteen when she went to the Rainbow Bridge. Both cats would lie on the landing and watch whatever we were doing in the living room. This was their cats’ eye view:
That was Christmas of 94, and though we had a tree, it was just a small one that we put on a table to keep dogs and cats away from it.
Amy lived with us for a while, and she shared the guest room with the cats. Debby visited there a couple of times, once with her (now deceased) husband Len. It was an easy place to have visitors because of the way the layout gave everyone privacy.
This is also the place where I was determined that I would no longer wage the War of the Roaches without help. We contracted an exterminator to come regularly, and that’s the company we still use eighteen years later. I was recently out in that area and drove by their offices, realizing for the first time after all these years that I’d never had any idea where they were located or what their building looked like. They always came to us. The first time their tech did an inspection of the house, I sent him upstairs to have a look around. When he came back down, he had an amused expression on his face. I figured he’d been visiting with the cats. It was only later when I went upstairs that I realized I’d jokingly arranged all my Ken dolls in a nude chorus line across the guest room dresser.
We were living in that house when I awoke one morning feeling like the weight of the world was on me. I called in sick to work because everything just felt off. I turned on CNN and was doing something in the kitchen when the news broke about the Oklahoma City bombing–a terrible day. All I could do was sit on the couch with a dachshund on either side of me and stare at the TV for hours, grateful that I felt safe at home but hurting for the families whose lives changed forever that day. A couple of weeks later, Jeff died. Two months later, we closed on our house.
I wrote this post hours ago, but it didn’t feel finished. And I don’t know why, but when I found this poem by the late Michael Shepherd, it seemed to nudge me and say, I should end your post. Who doesn’t obey poetry when it speaks?
Housefly
Now that this housefly
has finished wringing its hands
over the past – what?
For an older house way out in the suburbs, that place was pretty nice. The thing I will always remember is the red bottle rocket sticks stuck in the lawn on July 5th and pretty much every summer morning.
That was a fireworks-crazy neighborhood.
Another thing I remember is that little possum ambling down the sidewalk in broad daylight.