7. The Old Home

So now we were living at Mama’s old home which none of us had seen since Grandma Cassel’s death, four years earlier.

The proverbial saying that it takes more than a house to make a home was true. The place was not as we had remembered it.

On the occasions of our visits there, everything looked about the way it had looked in Mama’s teens; the enchanted little carpenter shop with the lathe that turned out toys, the spice-scented garden, enclosed in a tall picket fence reinforced with hollyhocks and covered with morning glories, its sandy paths leading to clumps of rhubarb, anise, old-fashioned pinks and sweet williams, currant and gooseberry bushes, and an arcade of Concord grapes. And, of course, the usual vegetables.

Nearly all of the furniture in the old home was hand-made either by Grandpa Cassel, long gone to his rest, or by Uncle Worth who, after his mother’s death, had disposed of it by gift and sale and had moved away.

The people who had bought the old place were friends of our family. A death in their household had altered their affairs and they, too, had moved away. The house was bare. The little shop had been sold and taken elsewhere. The recent tenants had decided to make the garden more profitable, so they had cleared out the herbs and shrubs and flowers in favor of more vegetables. The old fence had been removed.

Stripped to its bones the house seemed smaller than we had thought. The property contained five acres, but not more than one acre could be profitably tilled; for, only a short distance behind the house and small accessory buildings, including a diminutive barn, the land tobogganed sharply down the hill and made off through the brambles to the creek. (When one writes this word, it is creek; when one speaks the word it is crick. I never heard a crick called a creek.)

But directly west of what had been Grandma’s garden was a sizable piece of sandy soil suitable for potatoes.

If I may stroll on, at this juncture, for a half-century or so; after my mama’s death at the age of ninety-two, I bought the old place. It had been in my hands since my parents had briefly owned it, and was in need of repairs. I was advised of some distant relatives who had been in hard luck. The man was a carpenter of sorts. I told him they might have the place, rent free, if he would mend the leaky roof and make the house habitable. I knew next to nothing about these people except that they were reputed to be immensely religious and spent much of their time attending evangelistic camp meetings.

The last time I saw the house, my tenants had moved out.

The weather had moved in. The rain had poured through the gaping roof into the attic and through the attic into the second floor and through the second floor into the first. The place was a complete, irreparable wreck; plastering had fallen in, wall paper had peeled off in long strips. The only thing left in the house was a pious motto needled into an old-fashioned sampler. The motto said, “Thou God Seest Me.”

I told my congenial cousin, Watts Beezley, who had driven me over to view the ruin, that it was foolhardy courage for a man to face a motto like that while committing a major crime.

Not long ago I sold the old home to another warm friend of mine, John Scott, my cousin Sadie’s substantial husband, who wanted the potato patch. When I bought the place I was given an abstract of title showing how many people had owned it before good old Sam Cassel bought it. The transfers of title went back to 1827. The two earliest owners either had had “a passion for anonymity” or were unable to read and write, for they had made x’s for signatures. I imagine that they felt very foolish when someone asked for their autograph. This bulky handful of historic documents I was so sorry to give up that John told me I might keep them. All he wanted was the use of the potato patch. It was unlikely that anyone would ever dispute his right to it, he said.

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