Our Home

by Susan Cameron

I really like our home. It's a cheerful, inviting place, and most of my thirty-three years' worth of memories here are good ones. But things change. I no longer own the business that's a mere half-mile commute away. The neighbors I liked are gone or dead. This evening I put a can of graffiti remover and a roll of paper towels in a plastic bag and took a walk around my neighborhood, cleaning up four little patches of wannabee gangsta bullshit written on sidewalks and posts -- thanks for the new continuation school three blocks away, Orange County! Appreciate it!

Selling the house this year is out of the question; the bank repo across the street will screw up the comps for sure. I'm betting the ranch (house) on a comeback in a year or two like everybody else -- hope we are all not wrong.

But another part of the reason for dragging my feet is, I've been here so long I've grown roots deeper than my Cecile Brunner roses. I know the pricey-and-good restaurants, the cheap-and-good restaurants, the places with nice patios and tables where you can write. I know some of the hidden staircases down the cliffs of Laguna and Corona del Mar, the most likely places to find a parking spot at the beaches, even on Balboa Island in summer. I know good thrift stores and bookstores and coffeehouses, and I've walked around marinas and beaches from San Clemente and Dana Point to Seal Beach and over the border into Los Alamitos Bay and Naples Island and Belmont Shores, and I still don't know everything about this place. I'm still not tired of it. Above all, I've made good friends here, and I'd hate to lose them.

And here's the other thing: I went to five elementary schools by the fifth grade. I got my own place when I was seventeen and moved eleven times in five years before moving here. Amazing, eleven moves in five years, always looking for nicer places with cheaper rents and better roommates. It's not quite as tough as it sounds; most of the time, what I owned fit in my car. The first time I had to rent a little U-Haul trailer, I was sort of pleased. I'd finally acquired a piece or two of furniture and was a solid citizen.

Anyhow, once I hit Orange County, I planted roots and would not be budged. Still have not. I love to travel, but I also love coming home. I love to drive up and see the house and flowers and trees. I turn the key in the lock and there are the comfortable chairs, my pretty paintings, green plants and candles, and I'm home.

Could we make a home someplace else? Of course. Could I be happy living someplace else? I'm sure of it. And someday we will move, whether obnoxious neighbors finally prompt it, or economics, or my husband's desire for less crowded surroundings, or just the wheel of change slowly turning and taking me with it.

On my last trip to Detroit, I made a pilgrimage to all the places I'd lived. The house in which I spent years nine through seventeen had been painted charcoal gray and looked as grim on the outside as it had been on the inside. Most of the places I'd rented were battered and forlorn, and one of my favorites (the one with beveled glass windows and mahogany woodwork and ivy growing over the kitchen window) had vanished entirely. There was grass growing on the empty lot where it had stood, and there were three or four other vacant lots just like it on the block. It seems the City of Detroit had decided it was better to raze the abandoned houses that were being used as crack dens, fill the basements with dirt, and plant grass. Less chance of liability for the city, slightly less crime for the few remaining neighbors to deal with. I drove around the ruins of Coplin, Lakepointe, Evanston, Hampshire, Hazelridge -- crazy white girl risking her present just to look at her past.

People in Detroit in the 1950's would have thought the destruction of their city impossible. Twenty years from now, will I come back to Fountain Valley for a final farewell tour and find my beloved old home trashed or gone? No lie, that would be a tragedy. That would break my heart.

Meanwhile, I'll be out there in the neighborhood with my can of Goof-Off, helping to preserve the home that is still mine.

copyright 2011, Susan Cameron