The house on Oakmont Lane

Our family moved into a rental house in Provo, Utah in the last hot days of August, 1983. I can remember that specifically because one day after we finished unloading the moving van into our new temporary home, I started the school year as a freshman at Provo High. I literally didn't know a single soul there, and my mother said that when she dropped me off at the front of the school campus on the first day, I was shaking like a leaf. But despite my fears, the kids at Provo High turned out to be kinder and significantly more welcoming to a shy, awkward teenage nerd-girl than the kids in the middle school I'd left behind in Northern California. I found my feet relatively quickly.

The rental house was a prefab home with an unfinished basement and a back yard full of boulders and little else. But it was at the lower elevations of Y Mountain, in an area known as the East Bench of the Oak Hills neighborhood, and the west-facing windows offered a gorgeous view of the city and BYU nestled into the valley, Utah Lake out beyond that, and the Oquirrh Mountains framing the sunsets. Even on days where "inversions" made the air khaki-colored and gritty and the Geneva Steel Mill did its best to give everyone in the valley lung cancer, the view was still striking.

And then there was the allure of the house right next door.

Looking up from the cul-de-sac, 2021

It was an imposing-looking place, two stories of red brick and an unfinished partial daylight basement, built in 1979 (so only four years old when we moved into the neighborhood). There was a minor tragedy about the place; the original owners had built it from the ground up, sparing no expense to create their dream home. It turned out that "sparing no expense" was their downfall, as they ran out of money and lost the house to a bank repossession. Hoping to get it back some day, they had placed a lien on the property that made it difficult for prospective buyers to purchase it. It was a gorgeous home, but we assumed we'd never have the finances to buy it, let alone the ability to navigate the legal thicket associated with the lien.

As circumstances would have it, the original owners still lived in the area when we moved in, and they attended the same church congregation we did. We'd been living in Provo for about a year when they discovered Mom was interested in buying their house, and by that point they had largely given up on ever getting it back. They liked Mom, and they liked our family, so they decided to remove one of the roadblocks to purchase by taking the lien off the property. Further, because it was bank-owned and had some plumbing issues from having stood vacant for a few years, it was offered at a very good price. In the summer of 1984, Mom bought the house on Oakmont Lane and we made what was probably the simplest move ever -- we just picked everything up and trotted it next door.

The house, like all houses, had its quirks. The huge room over the garage was originally meant to be an open-air deck, the solar panels on the side of the house didn't work properly, the roof leaked, the plumbing needed several repairs, and there was one particular section of the water pipes that tended to freeze solid in the Utah winters. But it didn't matter. We owned a home again, and it was ours.

When we first moved in, the house had three bedrooms, all on the top floor. With six kids in the family, we really wanted one more bedroom. See that little window at the bottom of the house, in the daylight part of the basement? That was the area where one of our neighbors, a contractor, framed in and finished a bedroom for my sister Julie and me. We shared that room from the time we moved in until I began a series of moving-aways -- first to a college dorm, then to a shared apartment, then to a year spent working in California with extended family, and then finally when I got married and moved out "for good" in 1993 (Captain Midnight and I did return to live in the basement for a couple of years in the early 2000s).

This place has been our family home for 37 years.

We sold it today.

None of us could afford to keep the place, and in any case Mom specified in her will that we should sell it and divide the proceeds between the six of us. We all knew it would happen eventually. Personally, I haven't lived there since late 2004; there are other places I've called home since. And in all honesty, it was only home because Mom made it that way. Since she died, the sense of "home" has slowly leaked out of the house, diminishing by degrees as the little treasures and furnishings and keepsakes were taken away. Now it's just a place.

But. It was a place where I practiced the piano over and over again, where Dan practiced his trombone, where Julie tried her hand at playing the drums and Tim worked on his practice chanter for bagpipes. It was a place where we sang together, where we told each other dumb jokes and family stories and laughed uproariously at them. It was a place where fights and family tragedies unfolded, too. It was a place where I'd often sneak our long-haired kitty Chamomile, who was supposed to be an outdoor-only cat, into the basement room for a warm, comfortable snooze. It was also the place where I returned with Chamomile's body in a cardboard box after her final visit to the vet, to bury her in the side yard. It was a place where Mom cooked homemade doughnuts at Halloween and oliebollen at New Year's, a place where the whole family (and many friends) congregated for Christmas julbords every year. It was a place where I went out onto the front balcony one winter night, looked down into the cul-de-sac and caught sight of one of my neighbors, a teenage boy, delightedly dancing in the falling snow. It was the place where I graduated from high school, where I spent most of my years in college. It was the place where I first got into dialing up BBSes, became a co-sysop and started meeting users, including a guy who called himself Captain Midnight. It was the place we held the murder mystery dinner party, when Mom first noticed CM and strongly encouraged me to date him. It was the place I first announced to my family that CM and I were engaged. It was the place where Miss V was born and where she spent most of the first decade of her life being, as my mom called it, "grandma's little sidekick." It was the place we came back to when CM lost his job and we needed somewhere to regroup. It was the place where my siblings and I helped Mom recuperate from the many, many surgeries and other medical procedures she went through during the last twenty years of her life. And it was the place where Mom had the catastrophic fall that ended up taking her away forever.

I know it isn't what it was. But it was home once, the shell of the place that used to contain our family. In many ways, it was the last vestige of Mom's presence on earth.

Maybe that's why it hurts more than I thought it would to let it go.

I just hope the new family that moves in will love the house on Oakmont Lane as much as we did. I hope they'll enjoy the million-dollar view of the valley, and I hope they'll learn how to accelerate into the cul-de-sac in winter so they can make it up into the garage without their car slipping down the icy driveway. I hope they'll enjoy taking a bath in the walk-in bathtub downstairs, and that they'll always have enough hot water. I hope they'll relish eating the apples and grapes that grow in the back yard, and that they'll become good friends with the neighbors (who are some of the most awesome people ever). I hope it will be cozy for them around the fireplace on the main floor, especially on January nights. Maybe they'll even choose to keep Mom's "Mexican restaurant yellow" color scheme in the dining room, because they'll find it as joyful and sunny a color as she did.

I hope it'll become home for them the way it was home for us.

And I hope they'll fill their home with memories to replace the ones we took away with us.