Our house was built in 1973 and is one of the 3 original model homes built in the entire country club development. It was surrounded by fields and olive trees at that time, and this home was built to attract wealthy and very upper-middle-class retirees who wanted a quiet, safe life in a nice home on a single level but wanted the convenience of the city and freeway minutes away. The development advertised all over the nation, and groups of friends came from all over to retire in style under the mild, beautiful San Diego sun. Cue the 70’s jazz and pour a martini. That’s the kind of place this was.
And then time passed, and we moved here, and immediately wished we had not. It was to be a fix and flip, except that the market dropped like a boulder into the Grand Canyon. So we lived here instead.
For 16 years we have said we would move to the middle of nowhere. Through all of the ins and outs of life, all the craziness and career and birth and death and financial growing up, we have never lost sight of this goal to move to the middle of nowhere.
There is something wild and free about looking out your windows and seeing, well, trees, and grass, and deer, and nothing else, that speaks to our souls. We want to raise a pig and a horse. We want to grow a garden without tripping over it as it produces tomatoes on our front walkway. We want to go on hikes and runs and do the rest of our kid raising in a place where they can run and play without neighbors showing up at my door to helicopter parent, as they believe I should do.
I am looking around this house and wondering how we will get everything moved. We have basically agreed that we will sell or donate most of our things, and get rid of all this junk. But the junk is somehow special. It’s twisted to think that. How is it that all these mis-matched mugs that we never use are somehow important just because we got them before we had kids. They are ugly, and they harm our virtue. There are so many books we will never read, and shelves to hold those books. Books we once read and will never read again. We have boxes of homeschool items I thought seemed like a great idea, but will never use because we found something we like better. It all needs to go.
We need to fix our house to rent out. Someone else will live in this house. We gutted this house and re-built it when we were first married. I look at the imperfections and think, “We had a fight about that, and we learned how to live well together through it, and it still looks bad, but it looks like us. Imperfect, but very functional.” We have grown to like those flaws. This house is the story of us growing up and growing together. This is the place our children were adopted, born, ripped from us, returned to us, died, lived, played, made friends, and slept soundly at night. It will be very strange to know that someone else is living here. We are the 10th occupant of this house. When we moved in, this house was called cursed. “Oh, you moved into the cursed house.” Huh? People didn’t live here for longer than 9 years, and “Annie” was the only person anyone had anything good to say about. Her name is lovingly preserved in the patio out back. “Annie, ’84.” She loved roses. Dr. Death had lived here, a nice man who made a few mistakes in his medical practice, and was unfortunate enough to live in this neighborhood where people judge you for tiny things, like the color of your skin and whether you use the landscape service everyone else uses, much less your mistakes at your job. We were the first people to live here whose age was less than 55. We were 27. People hated us. They told us that they hated us to our faces. They told us not to have children, because they are not welcome in this “retirement” area. They told us they were happy when our first baby died before it was born. They told us not to adopt black children. They told us our children were too noisy. They told us we were too young. They told us that our extended family was not welcome to park in front of our house, on the public street, because nobody’s family comes to visit, I guess. Our family is always here with us. That was a great opportunity for them to call the police to break up our quiet family dinner. The police flagged our home as a “non-response” home. They didn’t show up when called any more because they got it that we were being harassed.
But then people began to die. After all, this is a “retirement” neighborhood. The calls to CPS seemed to stop. Younger neighbors moved in. Kids began to play with ours, because there were suddenly kids to play with. Those old folks eventually went on to the happy golfing grounds, and then they began to roll over in their graves because the golf course closed and died with them. Literally.
And we began to find other people who had moved in just after us, or right when we moved in, who were hated, as well. Some of them succumbed to the stress of the environment. One family turned to substance abuse, and their family was destroyed. But there are a few families, who, like us, have endured and stayed despite the neighbors. I wish I had known them sooner, but they, like us, knew that reaching out to neighbors meant the police at your door, a city inspector called to inspect a non-existant problem, or worse, CPS, and so we all just pretended like there were no neighbors, and made our friends elsewhere. As we found each other, there was an immediate understanding and loyalty. They were strangers we could trust. We had been brothers in arms and survived to tell about it.
We have been in this house for 13 years now. Ours are the first children to live here since it was built and cheer up these walls. We were the first people to change the front yard. We were the first people to pull out the ivy taking over the back yard and put in a garden. We were the only family who was the wrong demographic, were the wrong ages, had the wrong kids, invited over the wrong family, bought from the wrong previous owners, we were the wrong everything. And we are the ones who lifted the curse from this house. We made it into a house that begs to be lived in and love in. We brought life to this house, and we were among the very few family life pioneers in the neighborhood. There is something important about that. We showed these old folk neighbors that young revolutionaries are not to be feared. For all the times we threatened to foreclose on this place and live under a bridge (at least there people don’t knock on your door just to scream at you), for all the times we screamed at one another from the sheer stress of living in a place where we have been hated, for all of that, it hasn’t broken us, and it hasn’t been that bad in hindsight. And we were there to stare the horror straight in the face and help lead the change.
Now this house is almost ready for someone else to live in it, and the new tenants will not have to deal with what we had to deal with. That is a very happy thought.
Recent Comments