My father's house

My father's house was never really a place. It was because of my father's loves that we lived in many different places.

The first was practically a mansion with grand rooms, tall ceilings and elegant windows filled with heirloom furniture - because he loved my mother and that's what she wanted.

Then it was a tiny cramped home near the university where he worked, because he loved us and teaching. Our bedroom was so cramped they had to remove the closet doors to get a crib and bunk beds in it and even then the ladder to the bunk bed ended underneath the edge of the crib. But he built us a lovely playhouse in the basement with window seats and priscilla curtains and brought home a pound kitty named Pretty Soon.

We even lived in the Big House with our grandmother while my father traveled through Europe with his father who had planned the trip for his wife who then decided not to go. My father loved his father and I'm sure loved that trip too. I was three, but he called home to talk to me. He was twenty four.

In order to try and pay off overwhelming medical bills for four children, all of whom had serious conditions at one time or another, my father moved us to a rickety rental in a small town near where he taught, but when I began having horrific nightmares where I woke the family up with my screams, he moved us all back to the city. We knew his love for us surpassed his need to pay bills.

My father's house was really a home built around his family and his books. No matter where we lived, we were together and we knew love and security was in his office reading, or grading papers.