By AMY GESENHUES
My father drowned at Buffalo Trace Park two months before I would turn four. He was a Floyds Knobs native; and, after he died, my mother moved us from New Albany to the top of the hill so that I could grow up just minutes away from Sunday dinners at his mother’s house. Our street was a walk through a field away from his childhood home. It was a small cottage-like house with arched ceilings and an unfinished basement where I roller-skated.
Four years after moving into the house, my mother met and married a man who became my “second dad” (the term stepdad never felt right to me; he’s my dad). The three of us moved into a house that was on the same street, but with more space for our new family to grow. I ended up with three siblings by the time I was 15, two sisters and a brother.
My siblings and I lived sometimes happily and sometimes not so happily in that same house throughout our childhoods and into young adulthood. I remember when my dad built the deck in our backyard with my grandpa and great uncle. I remember singing along to David Bowie and Linda Ronstadt albums on the record player that was in our downstairs family room. I remember my thumb aching from playing game after game of Pac Man on our new Atari and later Mario Brothers on my sibling’s new Nintendo.
There was much fun had in my childhood home, so how could I say no when my father asked if I wanted to buy it four years ago?
Not only could I go home again, but I was going home to stay. Only this time it was going to be all mine-my husband had no idea what was in store.
Our first task was to tackle the kitchen. We gutted it and even tore down part of the wall between the kitchen and living room. As we painted, I remembered the last time the kitchen had been renovated.
I was in high school and my mother had picked out a wallpaper design with tiny strawberries in a pattern that was supposed to look like they were falling down the wall. My father had picked an older man to hang the wallpaper ... who proceeded to hang it upside down. They both came home to find the wallpaper completely finished with the tiny strawberries climbing up the wall instead of gently dropping downward. For some reason (I blame it on being the eighties) it was left alone.
Another renovation project my husband and I took on was redoing my old bedroom for my daughter. It was still the faint yellow color with the same built-in bookcases that I had used as a teenager. My husband and I decided to paint the room pink polka-dots and relocate the bookcases into the bedroom next door for my office.
The bookcases are tall and wide and not the most mobile of objects. While we were moving them from one room to another, I had a flashback of my teenage years when I was a bit less gracious than I am now.
My dad had built the bookcases especially for me. They were part of a surprise he and mom had planned for my fourteenth (fifteenth?) birthday. They had decided to renovate my room while I was out of town and replaced all of my furniture, painted my room yellow, and installed the custom-built bookcases. In true-to-life teenager fashion, I was mortified. I couldn’t believe my parents had redone my entire room without saying a word to me about it.
Let me just clarify that I love these bookcases now. They stand behind me as I type this and hold the endless supply of books that I can’t stop buying. But as a teenager, I was not as happy about the bookcases or my newly renovated room. I remember crying and complaining and crying some more.
“How could you redo my entire room without even talking to me?” I sobbed to my parents who were, I can only imagine, completely shocked and probably disgusted with my ungratefulness.
My memory made me cringe with guilt. Oh, what a pain I must have been as a teenager. But that is what renovating your childhood home does. It’s the excavation of your personal history that makes you come to terms with how you got to be the person you are.
After we situated the bookcases into my office, I thought it was about time I called my dad to apologize.
“I’m sorry I was such a brat all the years ago when you guys redid my room,” I told him.
“No worries,” he said, “You can do whatever you want with it now.”
