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?
Share your story in 150 - 200 words.
POST IT IN THE COMMENTS SECTION.
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Happy writing!
I reach for a book, wipe dust off the top, pile it on the previous one, and reach for the next. Once I clear a shelf, I dust it then replace the books and move to the next bookshelf. Summertime spring cleaning. I remember my mother teaching me to keep house, my father, too. Dusting, sweeping, scrubbing, washing, vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms and kitchen, wiping down ceilings and walls, cleaning out the refrigerator, breezeway, and garage, weeding the garden, picking berries and vegetables, and in winter, shoveling snow. Chores that my parents could have done themselves in less time and with better results. But housekeeping was not the only lesson. My parents also taught me how to make a home, to labor for the sake of love and relationship. We can’t help but long for the homes we’ve left, the ones our parents made and those we established for ourselves, our families, in our churches, towns and neighborhoods. Even though we know our homes like us will perish, we take up the routines and rhythms of homemaking. Dusting bookcases and wringing good from what is.
My mother is 93, failing yet spirited. Everywhere she has lived feels like home to me. I pass the house in which she spent her childhood 83 and more years ago, and feel the heart-tug while I wonder who lives there now. I look on Zillow for the house in which I lived from age nine to eighteen (well, twenty-one if you don't call a college dorm home ... which I didn't), then again from thirty-one to thirty-three after a divorce. I lived off and on in her retirement-home apartment over the last four years, when a fall or illness meant she had to stay in the health care unit for a while. I lived there to help her in the small ways one does when a family member is ill, and to take care of her beloved German Shepherd, Sage. It felt like home then.
Mom is full-time in health care now, her apartment sold to another elderly widow. I still think of it as Mom's. And, in a way, mine. The last place that, because my mother has lived there, feels like home to me.
In the health care wing, she has a lovely, large room that's big enough to accommodate some of the 150-year-old heirloom furniture brought by her mother, after WWII, from Yorkshire, England.
She doesn't think of that room, as personal and comfortable as we have tried to make it, as her home. Neither do I. No, it's a chariot, swinging low.