She bought the house her mom cleaned for 43 years
Of all the houses her mother cleaned while she was growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Nichol Naranjo fell in love with the one her mother cleaned on Fridays: a midcentury home built around an interior courtyard and decorated with European antiques.
Naranjo would sit under a Thomasville desk in the library and imagine herself running a business, while her mother, Margaret Gaxiola, dusted and polished the desk. She marveled at the spacious rooms, the fireplace mantel, the views out onto the courtyard with its abundant flowers and water fountain.
“I could see her wandering room to room, just dreaming about everything in here,” Gaxiola said.
Gaxiola said “here” because in November 2020, her daughter bought the house that she had cleaned for 43 years — an unusual yet natural outcome of the closeness that formed between a housekeeper’s family and the former owner of the house, Pamela Key-Linden, who died in 2018.
“I think I always knew I would end up here one day,” Naranjo, now married and 44, said. “It feels right.”
The house is in Ridgecrest, an affluent neighborhood with tree-lined streets and lush landscaping.
In the eyes of a little girl, the house was a mansion
surrounded by other mansions. They weren’t really mansions; they were just graceful houses in a nice neighborhood.
But the Gaxiola family lived about 20 minutes away in Los Duranes, a lower-income neighborhood bisected by Interstate 40 and known for its close-knit community and
semirural feel, with dirt lanes, small gardens, and goats and chickens in the yards. Their house was modest: 960 square feet and one bathroom.
In 1976, Gaxiola was working in a florist shop. She was 29 and married with three young children. She needed some extra
money, and a friend told her about a part-time job doing some light housekeeping on one of her days off.
That first visit to Ridgecrest, Gaxiola was struck by the beauty of the neighborhood and of Key-Linden’s stylishly decorated 3,000-square-foot house.
As Key-Linden showed Gaxiola around, she talked in a thick Southern accent that was hard to understand, which put Gaxiola on edge. The women were reserved around each other to start.
Gaxiola’s family continued to grow, and on days when she cleaned, she brought along her youngest
daughters, Monica and Nichol, who was born in 1978. Nichol, who was more active, was given small tasks by her mother to keep her busy, like emptying the wastebaskets and replacing the liners. Gaxiola’s husband was hired by Key-Linden to paint the house.
Visiting the house every week became, for Naranjo, a glimpse into a world of plenty.
“Pam had cable television,” Naranjo said. “Pam had brand-name cereal. Her pantry looked like a gold mine.”
After a few years, Gaxiola said, she and Key-Linden started to let their guards down and share a little about their lives. Key-Linden, who had no children, expressed her warmth not with words but with gestures, Gaxiola said. She kept the girls’ favorite canned soda, Big Red, in the house. For Christmas, she would have gifts wrapped with ribbons and arranged beautifully for each member of the Gaxiola family.
The Gaxiolas attended Key-Linden’s 50th-birthday party and her wedding to her second husband. When Monica became pregnant with her daughter Aleessa in 1995, Key-Linden hosted the baby shower at her house. She was there, too, at the funeral when Gaxiola’s son Gabriel died in 2017.
By then, Gaxiola had been cleaning the house for more than four decades, and had become a regular housekeeper.
After Key-Linden died, Gaxiola continued to clean the house until KeyLinden’s second husband, Richard Linden, died the following year. Then she turned over her keys.
“That was heartbreaking, and I thought, ‘That was half of my life, too,’ ” Gaxiola said. “I was saying goodbye. This was not a house to clean. It was a second home to come and enjoy.”
After Key-Linden’s husband died, Gaxiola learned that the executors of the estate planned to put the home on the market. She told her daughter.
Naranjo and her husband immediately wanted to buy the house.
Naranjo contacted the executors and said she wanted to purchase the house and everything in it. Because of the pandemic, the process stretched on for close to a year. Some of the home’s contents were donated or sold to others in the meantime.
When she finally moved in, Naranjo was overcome by the memories of her personal journey. Her father had painted those walls. Her mother had cleaned those rooms. She and her husband paid nearly $472,000 for the house.
“My whole family’s fingerprint is on this home,” she said. “It was so emotional.”
Naranjo has ripped out the wall-to-wall carpeting throughout the house to expose the original hardwood floors, and she and her husband intend to change the Spanish tile roof to something more like cedar shake. She is making the home her own.
But there are a few paintings that were in the home when Key-Linden lived there. There’s a chair in the dining room and a sink in the powder room that Key-Linden brought over from Britain, where she visited regularly.
In the primary bedroom, Naranjo has the vintage Thomasville desk that belonged to Key-Linden’s parents, the one she used to sit under.