The House My Grandmother Built

I have lived in the same house my whole life, and until last October I thought I understood what that meant. I thought it meant I was a woman who had never gone anywhere, who had married the boy she met at the county fair and stayed on the farm and let the years go by like water under the bridge on Opossum Run Road. I thought staying put was the smallest thing about me. I know better now. Staying put turned out to be the strongest thing I ever did, and I did not even have to raise my voice to do it.

My name is Nora. I am fifty-two years old, and I live outside a town in Ohio called Lindley, which is small enough that the post office, the Methodist church, and the grain elevator are the three tallest things in it. If you have never been to a place like Lindley, I am not sure I can explain it to you. It is the kind of town where people still wave at a car they do not recognize, just in case, and where the woman at the IGA knows your mother passed and asks how you are holding up for a full year after. It is not a glamorous place. It is my place, and that is the whole point of this story.

The house I live in sits a mile and a half off the county road, down a gravel lane lined with maples my great-grandfather set out as whips. It is a white farmhouse with a wide front porch and a kitchen that was added on in 1951 and never updated past about 1978, and I would not trade it for any house in any city in the world. My grandmother built it. I want you to really hear that. Not hired it built. Built it.

Her name was Opal Vance, and she was widowed at twenty-nine with two small children and forty acres and no idea how she was going to keep any of it. The original house had burned the winter before my grandfather died, and they had been living in his brother’s spare room ever since. After the funeral, everybody told Opal to sell the land and move into town and find work at the canning plant. Everybody always has advice for a woman alone. Instead, my grandmother spent one entire summer with a borrowed team of horses and her own two hands and whatever neighbors she could pull in with the promise of supper, and she raised that farmhouse up from a poured foundation to a shingled roof before the first snow. She hauled lumber. She drove nails until her hands bled and then she wrapped them and drove more. The men in town said it would not stand a year. It has stood seventy-three.

I was born in the upstairs bedroom on the north side, in the same bed where my mother was born, because my grandmother did not believe in going to the hospital for something women had been doing since the beginning of time. Three generations of my family have been laid out for their wakes in the front room, with the furniture pushed back against the wall and the casket under the window where the light comes in soft in the afternoon. That house is not real estate to me. It is the body of my family. It is the one thing in this life I was certain nobody could ever take from me, because who on earth would even try.