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Tuesday, August 04, 2020

The Home Away From Home

Tuesday's blog post and the realization that I must not have blogged about it already was inspired by a search of the old Chicago homestead that my dad was raised in. I don't have pictures of that in digital format at all. I might not have them in any format although my dad probably does. In the boxes and boxes and boxes of photos we moved from Minnesota. So the image I'm using to pretty up the post is just some random house. It doesn't resemble any of the homes I'm going to talk about.

When I was at the gym recently, one of the trainers mentioned she was from Chicago. Both my parents were originally from there, but moved to Minneapolis before I was born. It got me thinking about some of the homes my relatives owned (and sold).

The first house I thought of belonged to my favorite cousin and her parents. I found pictures online because it had sold recently enough that they were still available to view. There were changes made--the carpet was gone, revealing hard wood, the walls were painted, and a new deck was put on the back. The yard looked completely different, but it was still the house I remembered.

Next, I wondered if the old homestead had pictures up. This is the house my dad was raised in after his father died. I remember staying there whenever we visited Chicago because my dad's aunt and his sister lived there. The house was sold when my dad's older sister went into a nursing home.

This house had sold in spring of 2019, so yes, indeed, there were pictures. This house had undergone a bigger makeover. The kitchen was completely revamped, and in all honesty, it probably needed to be because there had been no kitchen cabinets. All the dishes (and everything else) had been stored in the pantry. The bathrooms had been remodeled as well. Also needed. The upstairs had been a half bath and now it was a full. Also at least one bedroom--maybe two, it was hard to tell from the pictures--was gone and an upstairs family room put in its place. The basement looked nothing like I remembered.

The third house I looked at belonged to another of my dad's older sisters. That had been sold after her death by her children. This house hadn't had the good fortune of the other two. Whoever bought it from my cousins must have trashed it because when they sold it, it went for 65% less than what they'd paid! Both sales happened after the housing crash, so that's not the explanation. There weren't really any pictures here and probably for a good reason.

Of the three, the people who bought the homestead did the best job. They kept the character of the house (it had been built in 1910), but renovated it enough that people today would enjoy living in it. This made me a little nostalgic. We had so many good times visiting, so many evenings around the dining room table talking and laughing. Running around with my cousins, playing games.

I haven't had time to develop these deep, deep attachments to any of the homes I owned. I was getting there with my house in Minnesota, but then I was relocated to Atlanta. Since I've been here, I've lived in a condo and two houses. Maybe I can bond with this house.