A House of My Own

From the time I was five years old until I graduated from college, I had mostly lived in apartments. There was a four-year period where I actually lived in four different homes. I first spent two years living with my maternal grandmother and great grandmother, followed by another two years (what I fondly recall as the "Cinderella years") living with my father, stepmother, stepbrother and half sister, first in their cramped tract home, then in an even more cramped rental home while their new house was being built and finally in the spacious dream house for a few months before their marriage fell apart. By the time I left college I had recorded 12 different addresses.

After college, I shared a small house with two other girls in San Francisco. When I got a job in Woodside for artist Walter Keane, I moved to a studio apartment, and soon moved again to a one-bedroom apartment where I comfortably remained until, in a fit of temper one morning, I stood up and quit my job. I had been at work just nine months at that point and had saved no cash. This left me with few options. My grandfather convinced me to return to Long Beach and take a course in shorthand. Although he had willingly financed my four years at Mills College, Papaw never believed that I would go very far with a college education. Secretarial training, he predicted, would be my true gateway to a good job. So, I returned and reluctantly moved in with my father and his new wife.

Despite the attraction of sharing not-the-dream house with my father, a different stepmother, a black Great Dane named Valhalla and Kee Soo, their Siamese cat, I longed for a place of my own. Even riding in my stepmother's Mark IX Jaguar or driving my Dad's 1946 Cadillac Coupe was not enough to keep me there. Within a few months I had learned all the shorthand my fingers could absorb and struck out again for the Bay Area.

I briefly lived in the closet of a huge two-story Victorian house occupied by a college classmate, her husband and an assortment of transitional folks. I found a job in the University of California President's Office in Berkeley, and moved again into a tiny apartment just two blocks from work. I was thrilled to be there and mistress of my own time and space. I recall earning approximately $150 a month. On that salary, I could keep my own apartment, feed myself, maintain a car and have money left over to spend. I was very comfortable in Berkeley for several years until I gave up the single life.

My husband and I moved several times after our marriage, usually over Memorial Day weekend so we wouldn't miss any days from work. We first lived in a charming Ben Lomond, California rental. Then, when the Air Force intruded, we moved to Biloxi, Mississippi. Our residences there included a slave shack where slime mold grew with impunity under the claw-footed bathtub, a room in a shirttail relative's home that had survived Hurricane Camille on Highway 90 and then to a miniature concrete block house where foot-sized roaches shuffled about at night.

After Biloxi, there was North Little Rock, Arkansas, where we bought our first house for $24,000. I loved this modern brick house. It was the first house we owned together, and it had three spacious bedrooms, two bathrooms, kitchen, dining room and living room -- all with air conditioning! We were able to use the money I received from my UC retirement funds as a down payment. And we got a good deal on the house because the white owner was anxious to sell and move into a neighborhood where his children would not have to attend public schools desegregated for the first time. We had very little furniture, but we enjoyed sitting on cushions on the floor in the dining room eating our meals on a door I had set up on concrete blocks and painted a glossy black to serve as our Japanese-style table. It broke my heart to leave our lovely home and return to California three years later.

Back in California, we moved in with my husband's parents at their orange ranch in Fillmore for six months before buying our own place just down the road. Our new ranch didn't have much of a house. It was just a small, board-and-batten affair with a shake roof, but  it had an ivy-covered porch and the property included a screened-in barbeque house, a huge cement-floored garage that the previous owner had used to house his farm labor workers, a tractor shed and a chicken coop. There was lots of room for the three horses we had trailered from Arkansas and a place for the mare and foal that would be shipped out later from Fort Smith. After the Sespe Creek flooded in 1978 and washed out five acres where our alfalfa field had been, I was eager to find a property with higher ground. For years after whenever it would rain heavily, I would lie awake at night listening to the boulders crashing and rolling down the creek unable to sleep. We were lucky to purchase a much larger orchard up the road that was safer from creek flooding, but we sometimes had flooding from the road. We lived in this house for a bit more than ten years, and it was here my children spent their earliest years.


After I divorced, I moved to a house of my own in Ventura. I have lived in this house for more than 20 years now. It has been the perfect place for me to raise my two boys among friendly neighbors, close to good schools, and just a skip to the freeway to head north, south or east. I can walk to the Post Office, grocery and drug stores. I am just minutes away from downtown and the beach. During the time I have lived here, several relatives have passed away, and I have brought their precious items into my garage. I have stacked boxes of photos and an entire wall of books in the garage. The garage also houses my 8-harness loom, boxes of fleeces from sheep raising days, spinning wheel, tack box with my English saddle and boots, none of which I have been able to part with.

While I have to say that living in a house is superior in many ways to living in an apartment, it does have its drawbacks. It seems that no matter how large the living space, I am always able to fill it to overflowing with items I can't live without. In the past, moving from smaller to larger houses only enabled me to pursue this lifestyle. Living in a house makes it easy to take in and collect things that apartment living won't allow. Gone are the days when I could pack all my possessions into the single bed of a pickup truck. Now, looking ahead to retirement, I am faced with the problem of how to get rid of items that have a lifetime of memories attached to them.

I have never been good about getting rid of things, mine or those of deceased relatives and children who have moved away but are not yet settled. Neither am I any good at getting rid of something that has not completely outlived its usefulness. I have joked on occasion that I would welcome a cataclysmic event that would sever me from my possessions. I imagine how freeing it would be to start out again fresh and new. An earthquake, a fire, even another flood would do. The time is now for me to make those bloodless decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of. I can no longer continue bringing things into my house and garage: there's simply no room. I fear becoming the kind of person people read about in the newspaper who dies in her home and the firemen have to tunnel in to find her surrounded by every magazine she ever subscribed to.

I have recently made a start and am encouraged by actually being able to throw out the half-empty bag of rat food belonging to a pet long since departed. I even donated to charity a gift kite my eldest son never flew. I just hope I can move from these simple gestures to more significant sacrifices that will allow me to finally throw off the oppressive blanket of possessions and their burden of care. I can only imagine a future wondering what I will do with my time. I might even be able to mark off some of the items on my "Things To Do Before I Die" list. One of those things is to be able to park my car in a well-organized, clean garage.