Photo: Ron Ciancutti
The home my parents raised me and my siblings in was just as important as the lessons they taught us growing up. It was (and still is) a full acre in a lazy little farm town near Cleveland. The house was built well over 100 years ago. My parents made several modifications, adding three bedrooms, a recreation room, and an extension to the kitchen.
A converted barn had become a two-car garage, and the hayloft door above the garage doors is still visible, albeit painted over and permanently shut. There was another outbuilding that was an efficiency apartment. It had a living room with a fold-out bed, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom with a shower. In my youth, my parents housed a boarder there, an engineer from NASA and a bachelor who never once had a guest in the 12 years he lived there. He was a quiet man I would see once in a while getting in or out of his car. On the first of every month, he would drop an envelope with $75 for rent in the mailbox. I never heard the sounds of a radio or TV from those windows, and he never complained about anything. In the middle of his twelfth year (1975) at our place, he knocked on the door, paid the month’s rent, and said he’d be leaving in 30 days. He was getting married and moving to Pennsylvania. We never saw or heard from him again.
My parents decided they probably wouldn’t ever have a dream tenant like him again, so they just locked the door; the place sat idle until my grandmother died and my grandfather moved out there for his later years. When I graduated from college and Grandpa passed on, I moved in and was able to save money for my first mortgage. For a new graduate and a single guy—that was the place I called home, even though it was still on the same piece of hallowed ground where I had been raised. On winter nights, the sky-high pines almost sounded like they were breathing when the winds blew through the ice-covered needles. It was a sound I grew up with and one I once again enjoyed as a young man. On Sundays, I joined my dad in the main house for breakfast and discussed the upcoming 1 p.m. football games. When Mom arrived later from church, she made an amazing meal; we’d light the fire, eat heartily, and fall asleep in our overstuffed chairs with our overstuffed bellies. That memory—and all of its sights and smells—could only be defined as “home.”