The House I Bought Back

Who Judy Was

Judy and Doug bought the house in 1998, the year they got married. She was twenty nine. He was thirty one and he laid tile for a living, and for twenty one years the two of them were the people on that street who helped you move a couch.

They could not have children. They stopped talking about it around 2006 and neither of them ever brought it up to me again, and I did not ask, which is one of maybe four things in my life I would take back.

Doug got sick in the fall of 2018. It was ALS. It moved the way it moves.

By the spring of 2019 he could not get up the four steps to his own front door.

So on a weekend in April, with two friends from his old crew, he built a ramp.

I have seen the pictures. It was a good ramp. Pressure treated, proper pitch, a landing at the top, a handrail he rounded over with a router because Judy did not want splinters. He built it himself, on his own house, while he could still hold a driver, and I think anyone who has ever watched a man lose his hands understands exactly what that weekend was for.

He did not submit it to the architectural review committee.

He did not apply for a variance.

He built a ramp up his own front steps so he could get into his own house.