Jul 13, 2018 4 min read

I’ve lived, more or less permanently, in 14 places – some apartments but mostly houses. Except for the ranch house where I’m told I lived when I was just a baby, I remember things about all of them.

The house where I spent my grade school years had “the” neighborhood back yard, the one all the other kids came to for games of kickball or catchers. I think of it as a “summer house,” because my memories don’t include much about the inside rooms. Everything was outside in that grassy back yard.

The house where I welcomed my first baby was the “kitchen” house, remembered for its large, country kitchen with the wooden beams in the ceiling and the stove tucked back into a stone archway. Midnights, I fed my newborn son in a rocking chair in that kitchen.

The house in Connecticut was the “Maritza” house, remembered that way for the kind Ecuadoran woman who came most mornings to help clean and care for my baby daughter as I retreated to my office to write the first of these columns. That house was a clean as any I’d ever lived in. Maritza was a wonder. When the baby slept she would busy herself ironing our sheets and my cotton nightgowns.

The house that’s most prominent in my memories is the “yellow house,” the big, old Victorian I’ve written about here for a long time. It was the house where I will forever picture my children as I most remember them.

Last week, I handed the keys to the yellow house over to a young couple. They lived in the next town over and said they always admired my house. They walked through the first week it was on the market, and offered the asking price.

It has been a long road to get there. Although I didn’t notice it (in the way I suppose we don’t notice our own faces getting older), the farmer recognized that the house needed a complete facelift. I think we had worn it out.

He spent several long years on a scaffold, scraping and painting the exterior. There were weeks he was so high up there I just stopped craning my head to look. My nervous nagging didn’t help matters.

Last year, he finally moved inside to finish up. Neighbors say they would watch the progress, but as with most people so close to the work, I didn’t see it.

Until, of course, it was complete. The before and after photos are worthy of a magazine spread or TV show.

By then, we’d vacated the house, mostly to make it easier for floors to be replaced and carpets to be installed. By the time the “For Sale” sign was up, I’d already been in our new, smaller place for several months. The last thing to move was the porch swing, which now hangs here at the new place.

The morning of the closing, I took a bouquet of flowers over, to welcome the new owners. I walked into every room, remembering good times and bad – but mostly good. I could conjure the sound of my son running up the front porch steps after school, or the giggles of my daughter watching “SpongeBob” in the family room while I cooked dinner. I have 15 years’ worth of those memories.

The yellow house belongs to a nice young couple now, and they will make it their own. But the house held so much of us for so long, I wonder if the new occupants can still hear us in there, running, laughing and living.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.