After 48 years and six floods, it’s time to move
We shared our lives in that house, but now another family can make its own memories
The Horrigans’ house, my childhood home, belongs to someone else now.
After more than 48 years, we sold our house on Sageriver Drive in Houston. We weren’t planning to sell after Hurricane Harvey filled the house with nearly 2 feet of water last August. We thought we’d rebuild like we’d done before. But then an offer to buy it “as-is” fell into our laps.
And now our “home of prosperity and prestige” (as the Sagemont subdivision was marketed in its early days), belongs to our plumber, Carlos. He’ll renovate it and rent it, and I want the next family to know what we’ve learned over all these years together. I feel like I should mark where the Christmas tree is supposed to go or the spot in the garage that’s best for marking heights of the kids over the years. I want to put little flags in the yard to mark the best place to hide Easter eggs.
Will they plug in a princess phone in the jack in the upstairs bedroom to the delight of a 10-yearold girl who will pretend to call David Cassidy on it? Will they know the newel post is rubbed smooth because a zillion little (and big) hands have swung around it on their way down the stairs? Will they know that the contraption we left in the garage is for picking up pecans from the trees my dad planted in the back yard?
It came to be “my” house in the summer of 1970. Little did I know that while I was swatting mosquitos at sleep-away camp in Garner State Park, my parents were moving. After camp, I got dropped off at a strange two-story house with my family and all my stuff in it. My red swingset was in the back yard.
I remember those early days well. This house had a double garage and driveway, central air conditioning and wall-to-wall carpeting. There was a dishwasher built into the counter. It had a clothes dryer right in the garage! We had definitely moved up: $18,000 got you a lot of house back then — if you didn’t mind living in a former rice paddy.
My dad let me pick out a paint color for my room. I got a new comforter set. My dad was adamant that there be no thumbtack holes in my new walls, which posed a problem for my collection of Tiger Beat photos. He made me a giant bulletin board, and I spent hours arranging photos. When I was older, I’d lay on my shag carpet with my headphones. I listened to the “Born to Run” LP a thousand times.
My mom said one reason she chose the house was because of the kitchen on the front. For nearly 50 years, we
watched all the street activity from our giant kitchen windows. Our kitchen table is the stuff of legends. It was more than our evening ritual spot (yes, we all ate together every night), it was our home’s ground zero.
My mom wrote her mother a letter every week at that table.
“Dearest Mother,” they all started. A steno pad of news between Houston and Chillicothe, Mo., every week. We had a zillion birthday cakes at it. I don’t even want to think how many greenbean casseroles were served on it, how many Cheerios were eaten at it or how many cups of coffee or glasses of iced tea were served at it. We wrote our thank-you notes for Christmas and birthday gifts at it. My dad did his “homework” at it with me at his side. Later, he tried his best to teach me algebra at it. My mom typed term papers at it (for me and every Univerity of Houston band kid). Fortunes of as much as three dollars were won and lost over Tripoley games at that table.
We sat around that kitchen table one day in the spring of 2000 and agreed to let my father die. “Are we holding on because we’re not ready to tell him goodbye?” we asked each other. Saying goodbye is never easy. We agreed that sometimes the right thing is to let go and trust that it will be okay.
And it was okay then and it will be okay now. Another family will live in this house and make memories of their own. I hope in the quiet moments, they will hear the echo of five decades of laughter and feel the love that manifested itself in small and enormous and goofy ways.
We had a good run, but now it’s time to go. Six floods and as many Horrigans — that’s a good run by any measure.