116 Powhatan Avenue was once alive with hope. It beamed with the possibility of being filled with children’s laughter, nights of popcorn and movies and coffee and paperback mornings.
116 was a white cottage house that set in the bowl of a steep driveway. It had one bath, three bedrooms and a back deck that looked over a rolling backyard. It was scrappy and jovial, but it struggled living in the direct shadow of my small hometown’s real estate star – the Tudor with the indoor pool complete with retractable roof.
The house was bought with my father’s mangled hand, or more specifically, the settlement he received after having his hand mangled in a commercial fishing accident. My parents paid cash for the house. About $30,000.
They were arrested on federal drug charges before we even moved in, which was actually the only reason that we were allowed to keep it. Since they had not moved in yet the prosecutors could not prove that there had been any drug activity had taken place in the house. Just because something can’t be proven doesn’t mean that it’s not true.
That house was all that my family had to show for the close to $1,000,000 settlement. The rest of the money and assets were seized by the federal government.
After adopting my brother, sister and me my grandmother moved us into the mortgage-free 116. It immediately began to sag under the heaviness of our collective sadness, anger and shame.
My grandmother had lived in apartments her entire adult life. It suited her. When something broke, she called the landlord. 116 had no landlord to call, but that certainly didn’t stop everything from breaking: the dishwasher, the bathtub, the sink, the windows. What wasn’t broken was simply half-assed. The lamps didn’t have shades, the doors never truly locked. The washing machine emptied into the back yard making one section of the unruly landscaping grow taller and wilder than everything else.
With the exception of dandelions, there were no flowers in the flower beds and the grass was always four times as high as any of our neighbors. Not long after we moved in, I wrecked my gran’s car. There was no money for repairs. Therefore, the busted Buick Riveria, sitting in the driveway for all the neighbors to see, was the highly visible beacon of our wearisome little world.
Eventually the variety of plumbing issues attracted rats. Not mice. Rats. Huge, ugly rats. One night as I sat talking to a girlfriend on the phone a gigantic, red eye rat ran across my dangling feet. This was not Ben. This was Lucifer.
My parents had bought this house in this neighborhood, the neighborhood where all the cool kids who got Jeeps and Honda Civics for their 16th birthday, for me. It was their attempt at an olive branch to their eldest child, the one who desperately longed for a room of her own.
However, we did not belong. And, we were certainly not wanted.
Before coming to rest at 116, we moved – a lot. My parents got evicted on the regular and my gran has always had a gypsy’s soul (she once moved twice in one week). In my 14 years, I had lived in more than 20 different places. I longed for the sense of home.
Yet, 116 did not give me a sense of security. It gave me a sense of dread. I was in a constant state of worry…worried that the lights may not turn on when you flipped a switch, worried that my friends would see the welfare peanut butter hidden in the back of the cabinet, worried that one of those damn rats would carry me off in my sleep. When I left to go to college, I came back as sparingly as possible.
My husband and I bought our house two months after we were married. We were 25 – infants. We’ve worked hard on our house over the past 16 years – a little at time. We’ve stripped wallpaper, gutted bathrooms (that almost ended in a divorce), built decks and fences, planted flowers, built a bar and turned the bar into a playroom.
In this house, we’ve hosted epic up all night parties. We’ve gathered with friends on the back deck as the cherry blossoms twirled and danced in the air like snow fairies. We’ve had some monstrous Come-To-Jesus fights.
We spent our first night as a family of three and watched our baby take her first steps and say her first words.
Our house has lit up during our greatest joys and it has wrapped its strong arms around us during our darkest days. Our house is not a mansion. It is not in a trendy neighborhood or in a pristine subdivsion. Some of the houses in our neighborhood have immaculate landscaping, others have overgrown grass and cars up on blocks. It’s not perfect, but it works.
Everyone belongs.
This house raises up to meet us when we come in from a long day. In this house we do warm, we do clean, we do comfortable, we do misfits, we do quirky. It is filled with love, and with laughter and with happy times and with caring, loyal, supportive, loud, funny, trustworthy people. You will always find snacks and a cold beer. The coffee pot is constantly ready to spring into action. It has roses in the front yard and a worn deck out back. It is always open to those who need a soft place to land.
Everyone is welcome in this house. In our home.
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
