My cousin Martha Jean Larson was my best pal when we were children. I always admired Martha’s house. It was a welcoming home, one that called you in off the sidewalks to take refuge in it.

Martha’s house on upper Superior Street – where her mother lived for about 70 years – was a fine bungalow in the Prairie tradition with a big front porch and concrete steps leading up from the brick street. Her mother decorated that porch and those steps with a garden of flowering plants every year: red and white geraniums in huge pots and New Guinea Impatiens in hanging planters swaying in the breeze. Martha’s mother Jane really knew the secret for creating a home.

“I grew up in a house where I knew my parents were right there and would always be there. It was a safe haven. And, of course, it was a simpler time,” Martha says. I remember that house so well – its sweet smells, its rooms filled with light and laughter and people who loved each other well.

Inside, the house had handsome honey oak woodwork throughout and a fine window seat in the formal dining room. We often retreated to kitchen and sat at the wooden breakfast nook by the big windows overlooking the yard. There we enjoyed Oreos and milk or any such treat Aunt Jane had on hand, perhaps a creamsicle or a popsicle. Maybe cookies were waiting on the counter, the scent of them in the air. Sometimes Martha’s brother Chucky would come sweeping into the house with his pals from the neighborhood, raucous and all boy. Martha and I would retreat then to girl territory.

Martha’s big, sweeping room was upstairs. After she grew up and moved out, our Aunt Marian lived on the second floor and used that room as her living room. Our Granny Johnson lived across the street in her declining years, upstairs from Aunt Helen; later though, towards the end, granny moved in with her daughter Marian and slept in the small room facing west with all the sunlight where all her beloved African violets flowered year round. She died in that room too, surrounded by her three daughters, who cared for her right to the end. Martha’s older sister, the lovely Nancy, also lived upstairs as a young married woman. So the upper floor of the house served several family members of various generations.

Martha married and had two children, Tina and Chuck. She has known sorrows too, ones a mother almost cannot bear. Her daughter, Tina, died young at 25 and left three smart and sweet boys, Chad, Justin and Brandon. “It’s not right, a parent losing a child. Your heart seizes up; it’s a fist to the heart,” Martha told me. Martha’s son Chuck lives in New Mexico. He has two children, a boy and a girl. So, Martha has been blessed with grandchildren. She treasures them and her great grandchildren now too.

In 1989, Martha married Vinnie LaBarbera. They lived for many years on Bentley Avenue in Fluvanna where they enjoyed boating and fishing until Vinnie passed away. Shortly after, Martha’s health declined. In this era of her life, Martha lives in nice room at the Lutheran Home in Hultquist House. We get out for lunch or a ride as often as we can, laughing and retelling stories like sisters might, knowing each other’s secrets, avoiding each other’s wounds.

Martha spent 32 years as a baker and 12 years as the bakery manager at Quality Markets in Fluvanna. Her baked goods are prize winners as are the many Larson and Johnson, Lager and Nelson recipes she’s treasured all her life. Two favorites are noted below, cookies and cardamom rolls. Martha remembers baking cookies for her three grandsons when they were growing up. Martha used the Crisco recipe for chocolate chip cookies, adding just a bit of flour to the recipe to make it perfect. Martha said her mother and the aunts Marian and Helen loved cardamom rolls. It seems to me that to be a baker is to make life a little sweeter. Good baking helps make a house a home.

The house on Superior Street is sold now, repainted a darker shade and the last time I drove by, had no flower baskets hanging on that great front porch. It’s a house that raised four children and housed so many – Jane and her husband Clayt, and later our Aunt Marian and our grandmother too. It sat high on a hill, kind of majestic in its way, sturdy and handsome. I recall it in all weathers, particularly summers and Christmas times when Uncle Sherm might dress as Santa Claus even though we all knew it was our uncle and his hearty laugh would make everyone laugh, but particularly summers when the shady rooms were a relief from the heat, when that breakfast nook by the window offered treats and friendship. Sometimes places we love stay with us in our hearts like that.

It must have been a fine place to live. As I think of Martha, I see her still in those rooms, in that fine house, because who we were in childhood becomes part of we are, and shapes us and sends us forth into the world.