Legacy Writing 365:172

This is our third Houston home: this time, we rented an actual three-bedroom house with enough space for us to breathe. Oddly, a few months ago when I went into the Northwest suburb where it’s located, I almost never found it. Everything has changed. Old access roads no longer exist, and new roads look so different. Even when I found the house, it didn’t look right. For one thing, that iron gate wasn’t on it when we lived there. Tom agreed that the house looks different from how he remembered it. I know the landscaping has totally changed.

The house is larger than it looks from the front, and it had a good-sized backyard that the dachshunds loved. For the first time they could be outside unleashed and run as much as they liked. There was an uncovered patio, and sometimes I set my little Mac out there and wrote.

Some things I remember about living there:

• We didn’t have enough furniture to fill it, so we bought a twin bedroom set with a dresser and an additional dresser/hutch for the guest room. We bought a daybed for the other bedroom. My mother moved in with us for a year or so. Though she put most of her stuff in storage, we used her living room and dining room furniture. The only stuff left from all that are the twin beds and the dressers that went with those, which are now in Lila’s room in Lynne’s house at Green Acres. I do wish I still had the daybed. Lynne made a lot of furnishings for the daybed with some Ralph Lauren sheets that I loved. I still have those. We put the pillows on the window seat in our current dining room and she turned the daybed’s dust ruffle into a dining room curtain for us.
• Either we took some of the roaches with us from the dreadful apartment or there were some already there, because we had to do battle with them the entire time we lived in the house.
• Before Steve R died, he made arrangements for where his cats should go. That didn’t happen as it was planned, so the cats ended up living in the daybed room with a gate up so they could get out if they wanted to, but the dogs couldn’t get in to bother them. Dachshunds are burrowers, so at night they’d get under the covers with Tom and me, and the cats would wander the house, even coming into our bedroom to say hello, and the dogs never knew it.
• Someone used a crowbar to try to break into my car, doing a ton of damage to the door. When the crowbar didn’t work, they broke one of the windows. The grand total of what they took: a pack of cigarettes. That was a pricey pack of cigarettes for my insurance company and me. They snubbed my cassettes–obviously didn’t share my taste in music. And they took all my photos and files that were being used to create a booklet for Steve’s memorial service, plus whatever was in the glove box, and spread them all over the driveway. Nothing was damaged other than the car.
• That house was the first place large enough that we could do any real entertaining. It’s where we lived the first time our friend Amy visited us. When the dogs ran in from the back yard, Pete charged her and she jumped ON the dining room table, I think bypassing the chair completely, so he couldn’t bite her. Later, they became best friends.
• We were living in that house when Cousin Rachel called to tell us that her mother, Aunt Drexel, had died. I vividly remember standing in the kitchen, talking to Rachel on the phone, and feeling so sad and far away. I really loved Aunt Drexel.
• One time my mother was going to chop up a leftover pork roast in the food processor to make barbecue from it. She forgot to put the lid on, and pork went everywhere. From then on, whenever they heard the food processor, Pete and Stevie ran into the kitchen with high hopes.
• We kept getting onto Stevie for turning the trash over. Then one night after we left to go somewhere, Tom ran back inside for something and caught Pete IN THE ACT. We’d been blaming the wrong dog.