Big House, Little House

For years our country was in a building boom. All around the nation suburbs expanded with beautiful big new homes. Young people rushed to buy them. Who wouldn’t want a beautiful house, larger and finer than the ones they grew up in? Credit was easy. No money down. The value of houses was sure to go up – and salaries would, too.

Oh, yeah! This is America where things are always bigger and better.

The current economic crisis was triggered when the enthusiastic young people who bought those beautiful houses could not meet the payments on their enormous mortgages. No one told them that good times would not last. Even their parents did not remember the Great Depression.

I was born in 1929, the year the stock market crashed. I remember the Great Depression.

Shabby men came to the door asking for work. Depending on whether my brother and I were at our house or at my grandmother’s, our mother or grandmother would make a sandwich and hand it to the man at the back door. My brother and I would squat down and watch as he sat on the back steps eating what may have been his one meal of the day. Sometimes our grandmother would have him split a few logs for the dining room fire.

Even as a child I was also keenly aware of the difference between “our” house and my grandmother’s house. We lived in an old frame house, five little rooms with no central hall. The door between the children’s room and our parents was always open. We had to go through our parents’ room to go to the bathroom at the back of the house.

I envied my cousins, the nieces who really owned the house I called my grandmother’s. Their brick house had seven big rooms and a long hallway with handsome mahogany doors, giving the three girls a privacy I never knew until I came home for weekends during my college years.

I always wanted a house like that. So I understand young people who saw a big, beautiful home and were told, “Just sign here and you can have it.”

It took me 80 years to realize I can be content in a four-room apartment. But I am. Surrounding me are all my favorite things: the books and pictures, the small souvenirs and mementoes. I don’t need or want anything else.

I am grateful for my two-bedroom apartment, with a room for my computer and a twin bed with trundle for when my son David brings my grandson for a visit. Thanks to my husband John, I don’t have to worry about paying the rent.

Many of the people I share meals with in the dining room are living on restricted incomes in tiny one-bedroom apartments or even one room “studios.” I am a lucky woman.