You CAN Go Home Again
Monday December 30, 2019 | Filed under:
In the spirit of the season, I recently signed paperwork to transfer a small plot of Indiana land that has been in my family for 70 years to the current tenant, a Vietnam vet. I’m giving it to him for $1 and paying the $175 in attorney and transfer fees. (Indiana sure ain’t New Jersey!)
The backstory:
In the early 1950s, my mom and dad purchased a home on a small lot in St. Louis Crossing, Indiana, a village of about 100 people. The house was for my parents and their first son, my brother Jim, who was about 10. I came along in the 1960s. My mother had worked in a shirt and pants factory for 21 years during World War II and Korea but stopped working when she got pregnant with me. You would have liked my mom. Her favorite joke when someone would ask about her working: I unzipped more men’s pants than any other woman in two wars (she sewed the zipper into pants and tested them).
Dad was living elsewhere at my birth and my brother was also gone, then 19 and stationed on a U.S. Army base in Germany. Unfortunately, my mom had become disabled and couldn’t go back to work. But in 1972, she ingeniously devised a way to use our welfare housing allowance and the little my absent dad gave her to pay the monthly $64.67 payment on a new mobile home, thus providing this fifth grader with his first indoor plumbing.
Our old house, which had deteriorated so much I could see dirt through the kitchen floor, was then demolished by a neighbor for the wood to burn in his stove.
We sold the mobile home about 25 years ago, but my mom kept the land and used the $50 a month rent to help pay for her personal incidentals in a nursing home during her decade living there. She passed away about 13 years ago, followed by my dad and brother, and since then I’ve been receiving the rent and paying the $200 in annual property taxes.
I don’t know why I kept the property so long. I suppose it’s because it was my last remaining connection to the physical place I grew up, where I rode my bike with friends, crawled into bed, got a hug from mom, and in the early years, trotted out to go to the bathroom. A lot of memories.
But last month I visited with my friend Christopher Jon Uriarte, who had never been to my neck of the woods and stopped to see the gentleman who lives in the trailer, sleeps in my old bedroom and cares for his cats on the same steps my mom cared for hers. I had only seen him once before. And, out of the blue, I told him I was giving him the land as a present. It seemed right. I was ready.
More kismet: After I wrote about the sale in a post circulated in Indiana, the guy who sold it to mom 48 years ago saw my post and texted me. He even remembered my mom, all those years later, so the story really came full circle. It was a nice way to close out the year – and the decade.
Here’s to kismet for all in 2020 – and a very happy New Year!