No Cakes, Just Houses

I have been baking. Cakes even. But due to circumstances beyond my control (summer, sinus infections, pneumonia, camping trips etc.), I just haven't had time to write.

But this week I found something new to write about when my mom and sister discovered something really cool on the Internet: property record photos! Ever since then we've been looking up addresses and inspecting snapshots of our personal history that live as .bmps and .jpgs out there on the King County government website.

I've been especially mesmerized by this one: a 1941 shot of my grandparents' farmhouse in North Seattle. Some stranger, known to us only by the corner of his thumb, holds it up like a real- estate specimen. To him it's just a photo, and documenting it is just a part of his job: providing proof that parcel number 2526039193 once existed. But to me, it's more than that. It's the house I've loved above all others.

Anyone who's ever loved a house knows that it's more than an address or tax parcel history. Everyone who's loved a house knows it tells a story.

If you look closely at this photo, you can see a weathervane at the top of the cupola. That weathervane is hanging right now above my office door, right here in the house I live in today. The big paned window: That looks into the living room where I celebrated the first 27 Christmas Eves of my life.

This photo was taken years before my grandparents owned the house--back when it belonged to the Frazier family. (But that's another story.) Long before the master bedroom was added on to the left-hand side and the den added on to the right. Before the apple trees in the front grew tall and gnarled. My dad and his brother and sister grew up here. My parents lived in the basement for the first six months of their marriage--right up to two months before I was born.

I grew up only a two-minute run away (yes, I timed it). My sisters and I thought of this house as just an extension of our own--running through without knocking, raiding the fridge for grapes and salami, plunking at the piano--and then tearing out again. My grandma used to wax the kitchen floor, then lay down a newspaper path to the hallway so we wouldn't smudge her work. In the pantry there was an old Hotspot fridge that had come from our other grandparents' house. It was full of extra food--much of which was stored in old cottage cheese containers.

My grandparents had added onto the house when they bought it, so if you knew to look, you could see the seams where the original house ended and the new house began. The basement flooded most winters. It was easy to lock yourself into the hall bathroom (my great-grandma did that during a party and wasn't found until someone realized she was missing). My dad once saw a lightening bolt come in the living room window and go out the dining room. And the front door stuck. Which was why we never used it.

My grandpa would whitewash one side of the house every summer so that every year at least once side was bright and white. I was impressed with the Dutch front door and the formal front porch. I thought the outside pantry--with its creaky door--was a true mark of the house's age (although I never understood why we called it the outside pantry when it was the only one). All the doorknobs and hinges in the original part of the house were cast iron--and some were latches! In the summers, the house was dark, quiet and cool inside, in contrast to the hot, loud, bright outside, full of shouting sisters and crowing roosters. On every side the house was surrounded by trees--sycamores, apples, pines, dogwoods, chestnuts, plums and cherries.

When I got older, my grandma showed me where she hid the spare key (hung on a nail by a twisted bread tie, down low in a dark, wooden pantry cupboard, where, she claimed, a robber wouldn't think to look). She had me water plants and turn lights on and off when they were out of town. But sometimes I would use it just to let myself in and enjoy having the house all to myself.

When I close my eyes and think of this house I see the tea rose bush that grew outside the laundry room door. I see my grandma's spinning clothesline in the backyard. I see knotty pine paneling and long hallways. A pale yellow kitchen. Flowers. Chickens. Lilacs.

In July 1995, my sister and I visited the house for the last time--at dusk on the day before the bulldozers came to tear it down. It was owned by strangers by then--people who saw not its charm, but the money they planned to make through subdivision. Sam pried the weathervane off the roof for me. And then we carved our initials on the side of the house, right there on the front porch. I felt that while we were saying goodbye to the house, it was also saying goodbye to us.

But I haven't said goodbye yet to all the houses I've loved. Like parcel number 1124000105.

Also known as the house I grew up in.

"We" moved in in January 1968. I wasn't yet born, but I was close.

That spring, at the base of a tree in the front yard, a clump of daffodils bloomed. Those daffodils still bloom every March. Even though the tree is gone and my dad once poured gasoline there to kill blackberry bushes.

The jeep in the driveway in this circa mid-'80s photo was my dad's. It was bright red with a kickass stereo. We girls rode on jumpseats in the back. The gable above the driveway was my sister Laura's room. My dad added it on in the early '80s when Laura and Sam grew too old to share a room. That's actually a nice way of saying they were too close to killing each other. The new room was a relief for the entire family.

My dad also built the screen that blocks the living room window from the street. (That was the same year he planted the bamboo, which my mom still curses him for.) Before the screen was there, my mom would paint a Christmas scene every year on the big window. When I was little, I was the star of each of those paintings.

Once, when we were older, we told our cousin Charlie that there was no way he could throw a football into the chimney from the front lawn. He took one shot. And made it. We were stunned for several seconds before we ran yelling into the house. My grandpa ended up having to make a special Nerf football harpoon to get it out.

The house is on a corner, at the bottom of a hill. When it snowed, we had a great view of the people who thought they could make it to the top without chains or four-wheel drive.

When I think of this house, I think of Christmas mornings, new babies, puppies and kittens. I think of apple pies, chocolate chip cookies and hot raspberry jam. Summer evenings, Sunday night baths, and water fights.

Speaking of which, my mom once climbed onto the roof with the hose to surprise neighbor boys on the attack. And on another occasion, a running hose even crept into the kitchen window to surprise my mom and a friend with a cold shower while they sat at the kitchen table. Although I won't cop to doing it.

My parents raised three of us in this house. The fourth bedroom and the laundry room were added fairly late in the game. It still has only one bathroom. But our increasing heights--and the heights of many friends, old and young--are etched on the kitchen doorway. Finally, small houses have one great advantage: the hallways are narrow enough for children to scale, arms and legs splayed, with one foot on each wall.

Today, grandchildren know this parcel as "DoDo's House," a place where ice cream is served for dinner and shoes are optional. It's a house that recognizes the family it helped raise. While my greatest regret about my grandparents' farmhouse is that my children will know it only from photos, I'm glad that my mom's house is the one they'll remember with laughter long after it's gone. Which is a good thing, since my kids' other grandma lives in a retirement home (City of Bellevue parcel number 1544600102).

I was fortunate to have two grandmas' houses when I was growing up. My other grandparents' house, parcel number 2044500230, was unique because my grandpa transformed it from a small bungalow into a multistory house all by himself. It's The House that Grandpa Built

That's his El Camino parked out front. Yellow with brown faux wood paneling, it was just one in a long string of cars my Grandpa Russ owned. But he didn't just own cars, he marked his life by them. Each event in his life was tagged in his memory by which car he owned at the time.

Up the driveway and out of sight in this photo is the detached garage where he worked on all his cars. And all ours. And his friends'. And his neighbors'. And so on. When I was little I was convinced I would grow up to marry a mechanic because I thought the smell of an automotive garage was the best smell in the world.

My grandparents, my aunt and my mom lived for awhile in that garage while Grandpa was building the house. My Grandma VeVe lives there still at age 92 (in the house, not the garage). And she still tells us to be careful when going down those front steps to the street ("they're steep and can get slippery when they're wet"). We used to love to swing ourselves around that pole there at the corner of the porch. And my mom still paints a Christmas scene on the corner window on the left.

My grandpa didn't believe in wasting space. My grandma's house is still the only one I personally know that has a sauna. And once he decided they needed a hot tub. So he installed one off the back porch and put in a custom door in the hallway so you could go from the bathroom to the hot tub without having to go through the kitchen or basement doors. He didn't want us girls to get chilled. For impromptu hot tub sessions, I would borrow a one-piece suit from Grandma that I swear was vintage 1940s. It was actually made from gold tapestry material. With brocade.

My fair-skinned grandmother would spend the hottest days of summer in the basement, where my grandpa had a woodshop (wood shavings are the second-best smell in the world, followed by Ford Mustang interiors, Corvette exhaust and hot raspberry jam). My cousin Heidi and I used to have sleepovers, staying often in the upstairs room with the long paneled closet and floral bedcover. Grandchildren loved this house because it had nooks, crannies, hidey-holes and roofs to climb.

We still manage to cram all of us into VeVe's house for Christmas breakfast. We have to crawl all over each other and eat at the table in shifts, but it's worth it. And when we all drive away, we still wave at Grandma in the corner window on the right, whether she's there watching or not. Just because that's what we've always done.

My family loves to get together. Not constantly, but enough that we don't become strangers. Holidays. Birthdays. Showers. Graduations. That kind of thing. And the house where we've done the most getting together is my Auntie Karen's house, parcel number 1980200105.

It's not huge, but it was built in the early 20th century for entertaining. The bedrooms are small, but the formal areas are large. Sunken living room, big dining room, kitchen built for a small cooking staff. And it's Family Central, planted square in North Seattle, with the prestigious address of "just outside The Highlands."

Four generations have hunted Easter eggs all around it. In fact, each spring, we crowd more and more kids onto that front porch for the annual Bunny Ears Photo. Auntie Karen has hosted baby showers, graduation parties, birthdays, Thanksgivings, Christmases, New Years, Easters, Apple Cups, 90th birthday parties, going-away parties. Oh, and wedding showers and funeral receptions.

But it's also a family house. I remember my cousin Charlie (again with the football) breaking a pane at the top of the vaulted living room window. A bat invated Heidi's room one night while she was sleeping. I think she's still suffering from the trauma. Teenagers have snuck out of it and back into it. Uncle Jack discovered hidden rooms buried under it. It even came with its own ghost.

Tall and stately, this house has sheltered, fed, observed and welcomed us for 40 years. Everyone in North Seattle knows "the pretty house with the big yard on 145th." We're just the lucky ones who get to pull into the driveway and make ourselves at home for a few hours several times a year.

So, these are the houses I've loved. But what about the one I live in, parcel number 8857640820? My house doesn't have the history of all the others. No orchards or rolling lawns. No nooks. No crannies. No ghosts (I hope). But I do hope that the spirit of the other houses I've known are here. My grandparents' weathervane hangs on my wall. And I like to think that my grandpa's gardens inspired the lilacs, roses and columbines I grow. Santa now visits my chimney instead of my mom's, and I hope my kids remember those mornings like I remember my childhood Christmases. Every year I make raspberry jam, partly in the hopes that my boys will associate my kitchen with good, warm smells. I want my house to be gracious and welcoming like the homes that have welcomed me over the years. I hope that someday someone looks at this photo and feels what I feel when I look at all the others that came before it.