The House

My mother grew up in West New York. She remembers her parents loading their 3 young daughters and infant son into an enormous Buick and going to "the country" to picnic and pick berries in the woods. "The country" was Palisades Park. The old town shoemaker (when was the last time you saw a town shoemaker?) lived in the house whose backyard abutted ours. He told me stories of growing up in Nazi Germany during WWII, prodded at riflepoint to shovel snow off the railroad tracks to make way for the cattle cars carrying his fellow Germans to what for many of them would be their final destination. He managed to escape to America. For him, this town WAS America. He was one of the original town residents who cleared the land to build his house. This was before even the nearby field was cleared to build the now ancient elementary school. The house I grew up in was already there when he arrived. We joked that it was built by elves for the original elven caretakers of that giant tulip tree in the backyard. The final residents of that house (us) moved in and settled down 1961. It was a kind of helter skelter architecture, practically all extensions (2 major additions and countless renovations added during our 38 year period) to what seemed to have started out as two rooms with a shared fireplace, built over what was more of a rockwalled cave than a basement (where we later discovered a sealed coal shoot). The outside walls weren't wood or brick but more like a fortress of poured conctete mixed with large stones which were near impossible to take down for the additions. For my father, the house was a constant and continuous work in progress. Eventually there was not one surface, inside or out that was not altered by his own hand. One time he was replacing the windows in the small front "piano room" as we called it. He pulled out rolled up newspapers from the early 20's used as insulation around the old frames. That could indicate that the house was built at that time, but it's much more likely the porch was only enclosed at that time and the house built some time before. We also found torch marks on the basement walls, and crude drawings of people wearing skins who appeared to be hunting some type of enormous furry beast with horns or tusks. (Nah, just kidding - no torches or drawings...but who knows?) In the waning months of the final century of the second millenium the last remaining residents moved out. My sisters and I were emotional. My parents were happy that they would both finally make it out of there alive. And they did. The house itself and it's tree moved out shortly thereafter. The next house moved in without a tree to look after (or any patch of green), but it does have two addresses. Progress huh?