Friday will mark Ruth and my 49th wedding anniversary. I think we both believe that our 49th year has been one of the most unusual. The coronavirus, all the “matters”, peaceful and destructive protests, and an extremely contentious national election have dominated the news. I’m longing for the national unrest to settle and hoping that the post election season is more calm.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our house on Lake LeAnn. We’ve lived here 43 of our 49 years. That’s a chunk of time. David was two and a half, Elizabeth six months, and Michael was about to be conceived when we moved in October of 1977. We spent the month prior in a cottage on Round Lake. It was the first of fifteen falls I would spend as the principal of Addison Elementary.
We moved in as a young family of four, grew to five, and became two once Michael moved on. We’ve lived here more years without kids than we have with them. Our house number was 316 when we arrived. Consumers Energy added a zero to make it 3160 for about and hour, and finally renumbered the entire neighborhood. We’ve been 11572 for over thirty years but still get an occasional piece of mail with the 316 address.
We brought our furniture and our dog, Buffy, from Kalamazoo. The prize piece of furniture was the first new piece Ruth and I purchased with cash we received as wedding gifts. The couch was the safe haven for me when I came home from work each day. David slept on my chest while I took a nap. Later, Elizabeth took his spot on the “nap couch”. Michael was my final chest resident, but those naps were few and far between with a three and a half year old and a sixteen month old seeking their dad’s attention. As they grew, each of the kids napped solo on the couch. David and Elizabeth used its cushions to build “a jail” for Michael. Years later, Brady and Eva took similar positions on my chest when they napped at Nana and TGO’s. This past spring David and Brady carried the couch from the downstairs family room to the upstairs living room. The two former chest nappers took on a new role. While they were here Brady paused a moment to look at the lake and said to his dad, “You grew up here! You had the lake everyday.” Sometimes brief pauses make things a bit clearer.
The “nap couch” cost $300 when we purchased it, $800.00 when we recovered it a dozen years later, and $2,000 when we reupholstered it again three years ago. It went from stripes of green, gold, and beige, to an upscale white, to classic charcoal gray. I know we could have thrown it out and bought a new one for less, but we wouldn’t just toss out our memories with the kids, so we’ve kept the couch as the constant link for our 49 years.
The first major alteration to the house cost $2,500. We tore off the wraparound deck that encompassed two sides of the house. I built an expanded deck with a safety fence on the entrance side and hired a contractor to add a screened in porch on the lakeside. When we were done we had two play areas for the kids – one with a roof and one without.
When Elizabeth was in the third grade I tore off the deck so we could add a master bedroom suite, install new windows, reside the entire house, add a basement for our laundry room, ping pong table and exercise equipment, and insure that each of the kids had their own rooms for the remainder of their time with us. When the carpenters were done I rebuilt the deck, moving it twenty feet closer to the lake. It was a $25,000 investment that served us well until the kids were gone. We remodeled again after they all moved on. This time we spent $70,000 on a new kitchen, two new bathrooms, replaced my second generation wood deck with a composite deck, and installed a new boiler and air-conditioning. Each remodel included new flooring. We’ve had peal and stick tile, ceramic tile, carpet, and now laminate flooring. There’s never a dull moment when you’re married to a woman with an eye on design.
We bought our first house in Florida in 2004. Since then we’ve owned four different houses. We also spent three winters in Palm Springs, California during our transition from Florida house two to three. This place on Lake LeAnn must be something special.
TBC