Memory

 These are recent photos of the house I lived in until I was 8 years old. The style is called “split level”.  The shingles were brown, not yellow, when we lived there.   I don’t know what it looks like inside these days, but I remember exactly how it looked when I was a child. 

The house was built in 1955.  My father bought the house on the GI Bill, as a home for himself, his sister and his parents.  My grandmother died in 1956, my grandfather died in 1958, and my parents married in 1959.

That window next to the front door is the living room.  The living room and dining room form an “L” that wraps around the eat-in kitchen.  You access the backyard from a door in the dining room.  We had a couch that took up two walls, and a round coffee table with a marble top.  There's a photo of me and my sister posed on that table.  My father joked that the kitchen was so small that  if you were sitting at the kitchen table you didn’t have to stand up to open the refrigerator. 

When you’re standing at the front door you can see two short flights of stairs to your right.  Between the two staircases is a chair with an attached desk.  A rotary telephone sits on the desk. 

The first flight leads up to the bedrooms.  Three bedrooms and two bathrooms.  The master bedroom is at the back of the house, with a bathroom en suite.  My mother had a  green recliner in that room, she bought it when she was pregnant with the twins.  That’s also when my parents put an air conditioner in their room — I remember sleeping on their bedroom floor during a heat wave.

The windows over the garage are the other two bedrooms  — the room closer to the front door is very small (that was my aunt’s room, she lived with us.  My sister and I shared the larger bedroom.)  In the hallway there’s a storage closet that has a short flights of steps into the attic — the attic sits over the living room/dining room/kitchen.

That second flight of stairs in the living room takes you down to the lower level. The garage, of course.  And that window next to the garage  is the laundry room.  The  actually a laundry shoot on the bedroom level, you can throw your dirty clothes down the chute.  At the back of the house is the den/family room.  

I spent a lot of time in the den.  I remember we had Danish modern furniture in that room, our dog Jo-Jo chewed the arms of the couch and the chairs (he also chewed some of my Barbies.) .  I remember that there was a huge white wall in that room, my sister and I once drew a mural on that wall and cried when my mother scrubbed it clean.   When the twins were born in 1967, my sister and I were moved out of our room, and the den became our bedroom until we moved out of that house a year later.

There’s a flight of stairs from the lower level to the finished basement. There’s actually basement sits under the living room/dining room/ kitchen.  There’s a bar in the basement, an actual built-in bar.  It’s the perfect place  for a party, and my parents hosted many family parties.  My father’s office — really an oversized closet — is also in the basement.

Some of those family parties were held in the backyard.  There was a big cement patio in the yard, about  2 or 3 feet tall, and my sister and I liked to jump off the patio and onto the lawn.  There was a big tree, I think it was a maple, that produced samaras — helicopter seeds, and a smaller tree with red leaves.  My father planted a few things — forsythia and pussy willow, tulips and hyacinths.  He’d grownup in Brooklyn, and this little piece of suburbia was so different for him …

The house was on the market in 2022, and I found the real estate agent’s photos. There’s now an “open concept” floor plan on the main level — they tore down the walls between the kitchen and the living room/dining room, and added an island.  The built-in bar is gone.  The cement patio is now a wooden deck.  The decor has been updated.  But the house is essentially the same as it was  in 1968.