Full House: A Love Story

My childhood home belongs to someone else now. 

Today, after 48 years and change, we closed on the sale of 11115 Sageriver Drive.

We weren’t really planning to sell after Hurricane Harvey filled the house with nearly two feet of water last August. We thought we’d rebuild like we’d done before, but then an offer to buy it as-is fell into our laps. “Are we serious about selling?” we asked each other. “How much is the house worth?” “Should we hold out for a FEMA offer?” “What would it take to renovate it?” We begrudgingly admitted that we were all nearly 40 years older since that first flood and the five more that came after it, and we just didn’t have it in us to do it again.

And now the Sageriver house, our “home of prosperity and prestige” (as Sagemont was marketed in its early days), belongs to our plumber, Carlos. He’ll renovate it and rent it, and I want the next family to know what we’ve learned over all these years together. I feel like I should mark where the Christmas tree is supposed to go or the spot in the garage that’s best for marking heights of the kids over the years. I want to put little flags in the yard to mark the best place to hide Easter eggs or put a note in the mailbox to warn people that lizards like to hide in there. I want to leave a schematic so they know where the dad’s chair is supposed to go and where they’re supposed to put the big chair to rock the kids in. I want to show them how to make a family pyramid in the back yard. I want to explain that they should leave this hook right here because this is where you hang the annoying bell every Christmas that plays Jingle Bells and grates on your nerves but you put up every year anyway. I want to leave a note to tell them that if they put the clock here and sit here, they’ll be perfectly positioned to see the clock flip over to 6:00 every evening. I want to art direct: “Stand here for your senior prom photo; it’s a good backdrop!”

How will they know that the Easter lily goes on the right side of the window sill in the kitchen? Will they plug in a princess phone in the jack in the upstairs bedroom to the delight of a 10-year-old girl who will pretend to call David Cassidy on it? Will they know the newel post is rubbed smooth because a zillion little (and big) hands have swung around it on their way down the stairs? Will they know that the contraption we left in the garage is for picking up pecans that have dropped from the trees my dad planted in the back yard? How will they know to put their stuff up on cement blocks when rain starts to creep up the driveway?

How will they know where to put “their” stuff in “our” house? What will it be called if it's not "the Horrigans' house"?

Many of you will remember how it came to be “my” house in the summer of 1970. It was exciting because it was the first time my parents ever relented and let me go to sleepaway camp with the Averitts. Little did I know that while I was swatting mosquitos in Garner State Park, they were moving into this house. I got dropped off at a strange two-story house with my family and all my stuff in it. My big red swing set was in the back yard. Sageriver was now “my” home.

I remember those early days well because I felt rich for the first time in my young life. This house had a double garage and driveway, central air conditioning and (gasp!) wall-to-wall

carpeting. There was a dishwasher, and it was built into the counter! I had only seen these things in movies or on TV.  It had a clothes dryer! Right in the garage! We could wash and dry clothes on rainy days. We had definitely moved up. $18,000 got you a lot of house in 1970 if you didn’t mind living in a former rice paddy. 

My dad let me pick out a paint color for my room. I chose “Crocus” even though I didn’t know what a crocus was. It was purple, and that was enough. Now, crocuses bloom in my neighborhood in Arlington, and they always take me back to that sunny purple room on Sageriver. I got a new comforter set (A comforter! In a set! Like the rich people have!), and my room really did have a phone in it. You think Sissy on Family Affair didn’t envy me? I knew she did. My dad was adamant that there be no thumbtack holes in my new walls, which posed a problem for my collection of Tiger Beat photos of David Cassidy. He made me a giant bulletin board that was probably six feet long, and I spent hours arranging and rearranging the photos. A few years later, after David Cassidy had given way to newspaper clips and high-school mementos, I lay on the shag carpet in my crocus-colored room, put some headphones on, cranked up the volume and listened to the Born to Run LP a thousand times.

My mom always said she bought the house because it had one giant living room (no dining room for this crowd) and a kitchen on the

front of the house. For nearly 50 years, we watched all the street activity from those giant kitchen windows. The kitchen table is the stuff of legends. It was more than our evening ritual spot (yes, we all ate together every night), it was Ground Zero for Sageriver.

My mom wrote her mother a letter every week sitting at that table. “Dearest Mother,” they all started. A steno pad of news between Houston and Chillicothe, Missouri every week. We had a zillion birthday cakes at it. I don’t even want to think how many green bean casseroles were served on it, how many Cheerios were eaten at it or how many cups of coffee or glasses of iced tea were served at it. Countless chocolate-chip cookies cooled on it. We wrote our thank-you notes for Christmas and birthday gifts to our relatives at it. My dad did his “homework” at it with me at his side, stapling like a fiend. Later, he tried his best to teach me algebra at it. My mom typed term papers at it (for me and every UH band kid). At least two Dobie High School yearbook endsheets were drawn at it. Jim and David hunched over the table with their black Flairs, laughing at their own jokes as they drew. Fortunes of as much as three dollars were won and lost over Tripoley games at the table. 

We sat around that kitchen table on a horrible day in the spring of 2000 and agreed to let my father die. “Are we holding on because we’re not ready to tell him goodbye?” we asked each other. We concluded easily that yes, that’s exactly what we were doing. Saying goodbye is never easy. We agreed that sometimes, though, the right thing is to let go gently and trust that it will be okay in the end. 

And so we did. And it was okay then and it will be okay now. Another family will live in this house and make some memories of their own. I doubt the term “Sageriver” will be as cemented in their family lexicon as it is in ours. I hope in the quiet moments, they will hear the echo of five decades of laughter and feel the love that manifested itself in small and enormous and goofy ways.

Today, after all the papers were signed, we discovered that one of the pecan-tree branches cracked under its own weight and fell toward the house. It hit the roof, but thankfully, it didn’t do any damage.

When a magician dies, his wand is ceremoniously broken to indicate that the magic is gone. I think that branch was my dad letting us know that this was the right time to let go. I’m just grateful that he left us a sign to let us know he was serious, but not so great that it did any real damage or can’t be easily cleaned up.

We had a good run, but now it’s time to go. Six floods and this many Horrigans – that’s a good run by any measure. We took the things that were most important (the memories and the kitchen table) and because we’re Horrigans, we left behind something that made us laugh.

Adios, old friend.