Heritage

For the past 85 years a house in North Carolina has been in my family. My grandfather moved his family from New York City to Winston Salem in the 1920s to start a southern branch of a construction company his father had founded. He built the company in North Carolina to a pretty prominent enterprise. He raised three daughters in the house and lived there for about 30 years. My mother was married from the house in the late 1930s and then moved to California. My grandmother died about 20 years ago and so for the last two decades my two aunts, both of whom never married, lived in the house.

When the younger of the two aunts died suddenly in 2007, the older one was already in a nursing home. So since that time, almost two years, the house has been unoccupied. My older aunt died in September and we began to think about what to do with this property. Quite frankly, it was maintained but not kept up for a good part of the last several decades. It is likely that the final owner (the person who is buying it does not want the house) will either have to spend a lot on renovations or will simply knock it down.

In January my siblings and I spent a couple of days over a weekend cleaning out the house. We took several tons of life's junk to the dump. We took another quantity to the Goodwill. We sent some of the furniture in the house to each of us and to our kids and sold a lot of it. My older aunt was a celebrity in town - so some of her stuff seems to have fetched a good price.

But on Tuesday next, assuming that everything goes as planned, the house will sell. My sister called it a safe haven. In one sense that is right. Even though my family moved around a lot, there was always the house in Winston Salem. When my family moved into the area, it was rural. The back of the property has a stable. Now the area is completely built out. The new owner wants only the back part of the lot.

I assume that the new owners will subdivide the lot and then sell the house off as is. I hope the new owners of the house, understand its history. At one point my siblings and I came back there to distribute some of our family's stuff. As we were rummaging through the attic, we found a bottle of Cuban Rum that evidently came into the country probably in the 1930s - although since there was no tax stamp it is hard to figure when it was actually bottled. I am pretty sure my grandparents never went to Cuba - although one of the legacies I got from our housecleaning in January was the typed summary of a trip my great-grandfather took through the Panama canal in the 1920s. The rum could have come from that trip.

One of the realizations I've come to from this transition is that things are not as important as people. The meaning of the house for me was always who was there, not what.