Molino Vega 9 & Bad Mussels
Episode 06:19:2023 - Prompt: Home Pt. One
Where Home took me…
My mom has created 22 homes since I was born. I count her studios because there was always a home-like space built in: a pied-à-terre, so to speak.
Sometimes our home was a small apartment where we shared a bed.
Sometimes it was a huge house where young renters became part of our family.
For me, home was simply a place where I felt welcomed.
As peers became homeowners, I chose to invest in the real estate in my head.
Experiences, education, experimentation.
I didn’t need a physical address.
Which brings me to Molino Vega 9.
She bought Molino Vega 7 in 2004.
The year was etched into the driveway cement before we covered it with brick.
I remember she forced me to see it while she was making the decision.
It’s not that I didn’t want to see the 22nd home.
I had food poisoning from a bad mussel, and this was the only day & time during my visit to Spain when we could drive through the mountains to see the property.
I was sweaty & nauseous and barely understood what was happening.
But I knew the place was special.
The older couple whose family had lived 100 years on that land invited us in.
They wanted to build something more accommodating for their age & mobility and were going to use the money from the sale to do it.
It seemed like a win for everyone.
My mom bought the property and renovated it, built a casita over the old pool (now the only basement in the area), and a studio out back.
The one anomaly in the house’s structure was the separation between Molino Vega 7 and Molino Vega 9.
Once the same house, two brothers had inherited it and then had a falling out.
They split the property in two with the care of a lightning bolt.
Something about a family rupture expressed in brick & mortar made it hard to really feel at home.
The other family that bought Molino Vega 9 also fell apart, leaving it empty & foreclosed.
Many years later, after my partner and I moved to Molino Vega 7 and my mom moved into the casita, Molino Vega 9 was offered at a fire-sale price.
The problem was the multinational hedge fund that served as real estate broker between us and the bank.
The company had thousands of distressed properties on its books without any connection to them or urgency to complete the sales.
Here was this empty house attached to ours in need of love, and we couldn’t have it due to the company’s incompetence, indifference, and lack of oversight.
And because I didn’t care about owning things, I was ambivalent, too.
Screw them, I thought. Don’t need it anyway.
Then we - as a family - discussed the advantages of owning this property.
I started to care a lot about how we could welcome family & friends from afar, how my mom could have yet another studio, our dog some land to run free, and we could grow vegetables, fruit trees, and a garden.
It became Us vs. Them, and I was going in for the kill.
(To be continued next week…)
YOUR TURN: I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about for HOME, so I went for what is happening right now in the moment. I haven’t written about this before, so it’s unfolding… thus the “to be continued” ending.
If you’d like to write a two-parter about HOME, please do!
If you have a single Home story to tell, that works, as well.
Where does HOME take you? Many places or only one?
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I dream about the house all the time, my home of 18 years. I find myself floating through each room- I remember every corner of it. There were so many moments that marked it as a family home. But it was my dad who made it memorable. He took great pride in being able to care for us, give us a lovely home, and safety and security during the war years and we were able to summer at the seashore. We always celebrated Christmas with a huge tree that touched the ceiling, and the greatest Lionel train set he had collected running around and through the gifts placed around the tree.
I remember our first console in 1947 with a black and white TV, radio, and phonograph. Every Sunday he would play classical recordings which were only grooved on one side. There was a Steinway piano in the living room and as soon as he came home he would begin playing not only his own songs but those of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter, and I would be lulled to sleep. To this day I can break into songs which fit any emotional occasion.
When I left home so blithely, I did not fully understand what I was giving up in exchange for my “freedom”. The many moves I made over the course of my life are head spinning to consider, however finally I have found that special setting in which to build a home for me and my family and feel rooted and secure as in the past.
Clearly you CAN go home again. Having lived my adult life outside of Boston, now at 64, my husband and I are back living in Maine, four miles from the home where I grew up, where my father still lives. I ride my bike up our road and then take a right onto Mere Point, the road to my father’s house, my childhood home. I ride past the now run down house that used to be pink and well manicured, where the other Karen, Karen P., with pink glasses I was jealous of, would board the schoolbus. I ride past the farmhouse with the hidden passages, where the twins lived, where the three of us played away many happy afternoons. I have double vision on this road, childhood, middle age, then and now, flickering, toggling.
Sometimes, driving home from food shopping in town, lost in thought, I keep driving down Mere Point towards my father’s, forgeting to turn on to our road. When I notice I turn around, making the left onto Pleasant Hill, arriving at our peaceful home in the woods, familiar smells from childhood, of marsh and mudflats wafting in, David, out front tending the vegetables or putting gas in the tractor will come help carry groceries, Coby will trot out to greet me