A transient society loses its home place

Larry offered to show me around the house his wife, Mary Ann, had inherited from her parents.  She had known for years it would be hers one day, but until her parents died, she couldn't imagine why she would want it. She no longer lived in the area. This part of West Virginia is so remote it would take you an hour to drive to the county seat.  But once it had been home; seven children grew up in this little house. Larry and Mary Ann decided to return for their 25th wedding anniversary.

The event began with a brief ceremony in the little Methodist church about a half-mile down the road. People gathered and sat on homemade pews. The board at the front said attendance last Sunday had been 17 and $190 had been collected in the offering plate. A soloist sang, prayers of thanksgiving were said and stories told about their life together.

Then everyone moved to the home place to feast on grilled chicken and a huge spread laid out on tables beneath rented tents. I caught Larry in the house, and he wanted me to see all the work they had done. As we entered a room, I said, "This must have been the master bedroom where Mary Ann's parents slept."

"Oh, no," he said. "This was two bedrooms. We took out the wall between them. Can you imagine how small they were-" Another bedroom had a picture of a brother who had died young. His Purple Heart was framed, too.

On we went through the rooms, now freshly painted and probably looking better than they ever had. Larry told me the kitchen and an indoor bathroom had been added on at some point. We guessed the dining room had once been the kitchen. The chairs Mary Ann's parents had sat in for decades had been reupholstered. The old radio had been repaired so it worked again. The linoleum on the kitchen floor had been pulled up, and the wood beneath it finished.

This little house had become a repository of memories, an architectural family album. It will be passed along to another generation, a reminder of the labor and love and sacrifices that went into raising a family. It can be a touchstone for generations who never knew the couple who built it to remind them of who they are and where they came from. It is one family's personal Colonial Williamsburg.

Most of us are lucky to have a family album from more than a generation ago. As Americans move around to find jobs and make lives for themselves, fewer and fewer of us have a home place. If there is any advantage to growing up poor, it might be that hanging onto the family home is a lot less expensive than it would be if it were a mansion. The Jeffersons didn't manage to hang onto Monticello. The Hearst Castle at San Simeon is a museum. The enormous Vanderbilt Biltmore House in Asheville, N.C., is a tourist attraction.  The grand houses of America's rich and famous usually end up being sold or opened to the public as museums, but not so the little house in deepest West Virginia.  Larry and Mary Ann have their own retreat and a community of people who care about them to go with it. When they want to get away from the city, they can come cook on Mary Ann's mother's stove and sit down to dinner at the family table. Their cup runneth over.

Patricia Hunt is a Mary Baldwin College chaplain and Staunton resident.