The Wife Who Moved The House First

Finding Lionel

I did not want to fight Paul for the house. I did not want a courtroom, a custody schedule for a kitchen table, months of lawyers arguing over who kept the good china. I wanted, more than anything else in the world, for Paul to fly home from marrying a twenty seven year old and find that the thing he had been so certain would still be sitting there waiting for him simply was not.

Rebecca is the one who first said the word “relocate” instead of “sell,” and once she said it, I could not think of anything else.

My neighbor Emma, who has lived across the cul de sac from us for eighteen years and who brings a casserole to every family on Larkwood Court within forty eight hours of any bad news whether you asked for one or not, told me about a woman two counties over named Lionel who ran her family’s structural house moving business, the same company that had relocated three whole farmhouses out near Coweta the year before rather than let the county bulldoze them for a road widening project. Emma’s late husband had served with Lionel’s father in the National Guard, and she still had his number in an address book she kept by the phone out of habit.

Lionel walked through my house on a Tuesday morning with a level and a notepad, tapping load bearing walls, checking the crawl space, running her hand along the foundation the way a veterinarian checks a horse’s leg. She has done this work since she was nineteen, learned it from her father, who learned it from his. In our part of the country, moving a sound wood frame house instead of demolishing it is not some novelty. It is simply what people who respect a well built house do when the land under it changes hands, and my father’s house, built by his own hands in 1974, was exactly the kind of house worth saving.

“She’s solid,” Lionel told me, meaning the house, patting the porch post the way you would a good dog. “We can cut her free of this slab, jack her onto steel, and have her sitting on a new foundation forty minutes from here inside of two days, if the road permits come through in time.”

“How fast can permits come through?” I asked.

“Faster,” Lionel said, “when the woman asking owns every piece of paper clean, and isn’t waiting on anybody else’s signature to move.”