It was 1984. Sally and I, after four years of marriage, decided then that the tiny apartment we lived in was getting smaller, so we decided to go house hunting. After a search of homes in our price range, and a few in our fantasy range, we decided on the home we bought, raised our children in, and is probably the one in which we will live out our lives.

When we bought our house, turned home, we thought we’d bought a mansion. We had what looked like a huge living room, a good-sized dining room, a small to medium kitchen, and a back room all downstairs. We had a medium sized master bedroom upstairs, also two smaller bedrooms, and a half bedroom which we used as an office for a while before recently turning it into a sewing room for Sally. That happened when I converted one bedrooms into a “Man Cave” where I can do my writing and printing, catch the Tribe or my favorite B & W sitcom reruns on a TV that sits on a mini-fridge, and look at my walls covered with Tribe and Browns memorabilia, and some large framed pictures of Don Vito Corleone, Cosmo Kramer, John Blutarski (Animal House), and Jimmy Buffett. We also have a bathroom upstairs, yes, the only one in the house (and we’ve survived the past 35 years). It also has a basement, an attic (both of which need cleaning desperately), and a two car garage. It was a huge house when we bought it.

Over the years we did this and that to the house. We began collecting things with which to decorate, added a deck, and for a while had a small round swimming pool in the back yard. When Jon was born we cleared the trees in the back yard and put up a combination Treehouse (that wasn’t in the tree)/Clubhouse, and later a batting cage. We’ve gradually done things all buyers of older homes might do: paved driveway, new roof, siding, new carpeting, and new kitchen counters. We put a new floor in the kitchen, had Bath Fitters come and redo our tub/shower, and we’ve painted a few times over the years. We haven’t done as much to the house as we probably should have, and it certainly isn’t a cover home for House and Garden Magazine. It reminds me, though, of the home I grew up in on Bowen Street in Jamestown, the only other home I’ve really known in my life.

Zac Brown sang a song which included the lyrics:

“And my house, it’s not much to talk about,

But it’s filled with love that’s grown in southern ground.”

Minus the “southern ground part,” (substitute northeast ground) I think of my home growing up like this, and wanted to make my home I bought for my family to be that way too.

We decorated some at our house where I grew up, but it was the people living in that house who made it a home. It was the whole family sitting together, watching the one TV in the living room that made it a home. It was Sunday Dinners that made it a home. It was the holidays spent as a kid that made it a home. It was having a family of our own, after we left, and bringing them there to visit that made it a home. It was the mailman, the man who picked up our trash after we cleaned the basement and garage, the carpenters who worked on the apartment upstairs, the dryer repairman, and the plumber, sitting at our kitchen table having coffee and cookies, whenever they came to do anything at the house. Those people helped make our house a home. I guess I just carried those memories to the house I eventually bought for my family, and really haven’t sunken as much into the physical part of the house, but have my memories of the human part of our home.

So, if you come to our house, you’ll see what some might think is a lot of clutter, and even though there’s a lot of it, the home has become kind of empty at times. Being just Sally and me, and of course, Spook, our cat, there’s sometimes an echo resounding when we talk to each other, or the cat yells for his dinner. That’s not to say we don’t love each other and cherish each other’s company, it just means what we’ve built that appears to be a Full House, has lost some of what we had that made it a Full Home.

Oh, we have memories, many of them. We have memories of Chasy’s violin practicing coming from what’s now my man cave. We have the memories of me getting up at 3:00 am because with three women in the house and only one bathroom, it’s the only way I could get ready to be on time for work each day. We have memories of Chrissy practicing her clarinet when she was in 5th grade, of her drawings and paintings she did for us, and her looking out the window at us in the winter as we shoveled the driveway because she hated the cold and wasn’t a fan of the snow. (Point of interest: Chris and Jeff, when they returned from the warmer climates of California and Virginia, with a stay near Pittsburgh where it wasn’t quite the same winter there than here, became lovers of snowmobiling, so I guess winter grew on her, a little.)

We have memories of Chasy and Chrissy putting Jon in a box decorated like a car, and pushing him around the living room making car noises when he was just a toddler. We have memories of Jon, practicing hitting in the basement, using a wiffel ball and bat, a batting tee, and a small backyard soccer/driveway hockey net. I also remember, though not my fondest memory of Jon, him practicing the drums after dinner, as he played in his Middle School Band. And we have memories of being able to find Jon without calling him by following the trail of pop cans left in places around the house. I wouldn’t trade any of these memories, even for a full head of hair. These memories made this house, a home.

And it’s still a home because of those living in it now (Sally, Spook, and me.) And it’s a home when friends and family come over and share company with us, break bread with us, and fill in some of the space that makes our house echo from time to time. The warmth of it being our home is especially evident when Sally and I host our annual Christmas gathering, which was originally started by one of my best friends, John Tordoff, Jr., and his bride Debra, who both left this earth way too soon.

But, our house, more than ever, is a home bursting at the seams if, and when, we’re able to (those couple to few times each year) have the whole clan together: Sally, me, Chasy, Chrissy, Jon, and now Jeff, Richard, Erica, Justin and Jen, Jeffrey and Savannah, Kolby and Cassie, Josh, and hopefully we’ll meet Leah soon, Xavier, if we can ever have him come visit, and when we welcome our Little “G” baby, Gianna Michelle, our very newest addition to the family and our home. Oh yeah, of course Spook too.

Yes, at times, we may feel like we live in an empty home in a cluttered house (sometimes it’s more empty than we’d like) when we hear those echoed conversations ring through our heads, but we’re able to fill in those echoes with the family pictures on the wall, with the special family tree we put up at Christmas, with the phone calls we receive, but especially with those times we are all, or mostly all, able to come together and share laughter and love. The house, itself, is just a structure, but special people, and love, have made it our home.