One of the strangest things my grandparents ever asked for was a simple photograph.
My mother’s parents wanted someone in the family to take a picture of them standing on the front porch of their home waving, like they were saying goodbye as someone drove away.
It seemed a strange request, because my grandparents had never asked for even a family photo in the past. My sister and I joked about the request, occasionally waving to the camera during Christmas or birthday pictures. I think my mother eventually took the picture and printed it for them, but I have no idea what ever happened to it.
Today, with both of them gone and the number of departed family members growing, I understand that request so much and I’m ashamed that I poked fun at it.
This understanding came into focus for me recently when I checked up on their former home in Scott Circle. Selfishly, I was looking into the property to see its current value. With my grandfather, Roy Harless, already gone, when my grandmother, Ernestine, died in 2013 my family decided to sell their home. With recent revaluations of property, I nosily wanted to see how much the value had gone up compared to what we had sold it for.
What I got instead was a tour of my grandparents’ home without them in it.
My grandfather built the house in 1964 and it was the only home I ever knew them in. They were affixed to the house in my memory. Nearly every recollection I had of them was paired with a section of the house.
Looking into the home value I came across a site online that facilitates real estate transactions. There I found photographs used to help sell the house, as it had changed hands a couple of times since we sold it.
It’s very jarring to see your grandparents’ house modernized.
It seemed like everywhere there used to be hard flooring was now covered by carpet. Where carpet used to be, there was now hard flooring.
When my grandparents lived there the home had two living rooms, one to watch television and one that was off limits. The true living room, on the north side of the home, had two televisions because my grandparents’ viewing tastes didn’t always line up. The pristine living room, on a southern wall, was filled with antique knickknacks, including a very old curio cabinet that contained my grandmother’s collection of decorative salt and pepper shakers. Oddly, the more current photographs revealed that the roles of the two living rooms had reversed, to the point that the former televisions had been removed and replaced by a modern, mirrored curio cabinet filled with newer knickknacks.
Gone was the plastic accordion-fold door that separated the living areas from the bedrooms. When expanded across the entryway, it connected to the opposing wall with a magnet.
Gone was the basketball hoop my grandpa had put next to his driveway for me. Having retired from the local United Telephone company, he chose to affix the backboard to telephone pole that slowly twisted to the south as it aged. A gentle hill just behind the hoop made collecting missed shots a more troubling chore.
Gone from the kitchen were my grandmother’s ceramic cookie jars, shaped in as variety of creepily expressive characters, like a pig or a clown.
Gone was the battery-powered, black-and-white television from the kitchen island. With a screen only a couple inches wide, it was given to my grandfather as a retirement gift, long before portable televisions became common. I thought it was from the future.
Gone was the old pile of stacked wood near the back of the property that I don’t recall ever being touched. The home had a fireplace but it was never used, except once as a home for a bee hive. The bees that made their way into the home were collected with a Hoover cannister vacuum cleaner.
Gone was the string atop a shallow ledge in the dining room that held dozens of greeting cards flat against the wall. Many of the cards were older than I was. Some were very ornate, preserved with plastic covers.
Gone was my grandfather’s CB radio, strangely placed in the kitchen so he could converse with truckers. His handle – Mopar.
Emptied was the first bedroom down the hallway, which had belonged to my uncle Wayne. I never met him, because was he was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1966, six years before I was born. He was in the Air Force and just 18 years old. The pain of the loss revealed to me expressly in how little it was talked about. His bedroom had remained unchanged as my grandparents lived out their years. Same items on the walls. Same twin bed and bedspread, ready for a visit from someone who was never coming home.
And now – gone are my grandparents, as are most of their neighbors in Scotts Circle, replaced by new families with new ideas of what “home” means to them. My grandparents loved that home and their neighbors in the tiny Scott Circle loop. They loved to sit on their front porch and they loved when people would come to visit them.
They knew they couldn’t stay on that porch forever, hoping that the image of them smiling and waving would last beyond them.
–Chad Williamson is the managing editor at the Journal-Tribune.