Good story about the value of owning and maintaining a home

Scott Molloy: An empty house and memories of striving parents
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 14, 2009
SCOTT MOLLOY

AS THE BABY BOOMERS speed past age 60 now, the only thing moving faster is the deaths of their parents. When the 20th Century marched on, Americans escaped childhood diseases, the punishing 1930s, and the European and Asian ravages of World War II. Those who made it through those gauntlets lived longer than their predecessors and parented the largest generation in American history — over 75 million kids — between 1946 and 1964. We Baby Boomers got so used to having our parents around that we became a generation of orphans when they left. They had been through so much, including our tumultuous teenage years, it just seemed they would be there forever.
Less than a decade after my own birth in 1946, my family moved into a new cottage on Sinclair Avenue in Providence, in 1955, part of the post-World War II suburban exodus from the inner city. We were only a mile away from the old house near Columbus Square, but it seemed like a change in time zones. Back then, municipal employees had to live in the urban corridor because of a residency requirement that made sure they paid local taxes. Both my parents worked for the city, my father as a cop and my mother as a school teacher. Mom had gone back to college while my sister and I were still in elementary school.
For the better-off Baby Boomer generation the two-wage-earner family became the norm, although Rhode Island had led the nation in the number of women workers, usually immigrants in lower-paying factory jobs. The new discretionary income gave us a different kind of graduation than my mother experienced when she attended Rhode Island College. Two decent salaries in one family and you stepped out of the working class into a lower middle-class existence in the 1950s and 1960s.
The streets around the outskirts of Providence were filled with police officers, firefighters, teachers and city workers nestled into a piece of the good life on the borders of surrounding towns, such as North Providence, Johnston or Cranston. My family lived on one of the few streets that intersected with Pontiac Avenue in Providence. Almost suburbia. Amazingly, the house was in Providence and the backyard in Cranston! My sister and I grew up in that new home which always seemed so roomy but now looks like a shoebox as houses have burgeoned.
In 1978, the year of the blizzard, my parents moved to West Warwick, just a few years before retirement. My sister and I had already left. At the same time, my grandmother sold her house in Cranston and lived downstairs in my parents’ new split-level residence.
Although I never resided in the West Warwick house, it was convenient, one-stop relative shopping: Nana and my parents only a few steps from each other. When they first moved in, my grandmother was still driving and there were times when no one was home. I just unlocked the door and waited for someone to show up.
My sister and I got to relive our own childhoods when we frequently brought our kids to visit. Holiday feasts continued unabated and what a joy it was to watch our own offspring bond with Mom and Dad. Our proper upbringing, although severely challenged during the 1960s, was now validated. The proof of the pudding was the grandchildren.
The joy obscured the passage of time. By the late 1990s, my grandmother entered a nursing home when my mother was unable to take care of her and our dad, who now had a variety of ailments too. Eventually, he ended up in a health facility as well, succumbing in 1999 at 75. My grandmother held on until age 99, dying in 2001.
After their deaths my mother lived alone in the West Warwick house with the ghosts of her mother and husband. She got along well but was having her own medical problems. My sister and I tried our best to maintain the place but always felt we never did enough. Still there was such festivity when the grandchildren, now in their teens, came by to cheer her up.
One day in 2006, she just called it quits. Stopped taking her mountain of medications and went to a hospice and willed herself to death after a few days. Before leaving she took my sister Jackie and me into the bedroom to show us all the personal papers, bank accounts, and house documents so we would have no trouble finding them. She was 80 years old.
We inherited the delayed treasure of the Great Depression. All those nickels and dimes the greatest generation saved so scrupulously after World War II finally added up. My mother told us to spend it and enjoy ourselves although our own frugal upbringing clashed with any financial Bacchanalia.
There were other savings too. Old lumber in the garage my father could never throw out, the nails carefully extracted and hammered straight again for reuse some day. Leftover linoleum, shingles, and bricks stood ready to do patch work. My mother had squirreled plastic bags around the house, filled with everything and anything that a housewife would ever need. As well as they did, our parents and their generation could never shake the fear that another Great Depression lurked nearby.
We had to clean all this out and sell the West Warwick house just as the real-estate market tanked. Buyers fell by the wayside when they couldn’t dispose of their own homes. Mortgage credit disappeared, and the price of our parents’ homestead plunged. However, the stress of keeping the house tiptop outweighed any loss of unrealized income. My sister and I dutifully kept it neat, cut and maintained the lawn, cleaned the rugs, refurbished the backyard shed, repaired the concrete patio, and blacktopped the driveway. And wished we had done more of those things when they were alive.
But there was more to it than just historic preservation and an eventual sale. We felt an obligation to maintain the property almost out of respect to our parents who had worked so long and hard to achieve the American Dream. And we’d be damned if we would allow the place to deteriorate on our watch, recession or not.
I soon realized that I paid a psychic price by coming by several times a week and walking into a house once so full of life and now a quiet family museum. Most of the furnishings remained and I could visualize my parents still there: my kids in their Halloween costumes, sitting on dad’s lap; the smell of one of my mom’s delicacies; my grandmother’s voice yelling for me to come downstairs to her apartment, filled with family photographs and knickknacks from around the corner and around the world.
After 20 months, a buyer came forth and we closed the deal and a chapter in our lives. We took out the remaining items as the home devolved into just another empty house. And when we closed the front door for the final time, I finally understood why I had continually stopped by like a moth attracted to candlelight.
With every empty visit I subconsciously expected my grandmother to come home from shopping, my mother to reappear from the hairdresser, or my father to walk up the front stairs from some stray errand. But they never materialized. For more than 50 years they had been there for us, our entire adult lives. They had always come home. Now they were gone. Despite the passage of time I still have trouble accepting the reality.
But the hardest passage in life had been made. We were now middle-age orphans like so many other Baby Boomers. The aberration generation had enjoyed our parents, the greatest generation, like no other children before us.
Thank you, Mom and Dad, for all the things we could never fully appreciate until you were no longer here.
Scott Molloy is a professor at the Schmidt Labor Research Center, at the University of Rhode Island.