When my husband Jim and I first met, we decided to make a go of it together, in a house with a picket fence and some kids. What we started out with was a small rental in a rundown neighborhood. Over the years, we had several houses, none with a picket fence, and were blessed with a child. We both worked hard and saved our money. We leveraged our houses to build equity during a growing housing market. We were frugal. We used to call it "building our empire." It was fun thinking of it that way and we were a team, in it together. Jim used to say he was pretty sure as a baby boomer he'd never be able to retire. That turned out to be true, but not for the reason he thought. When Jim died, the period of our life called "building our empire" came to a screeching halt.
We started out as hippies, Jim and I. But we, like so many other boomers, made a gradual shift over to the pursuit of the American dream. The practicalities of life made it clear to us we needed two incomes. Home ownership was a big part of the dream, and that takes money. Our first house purchase was in a blue collar neighborhood called Arbor Lodge in North Portland. We bought an old Victorian built in 1901 which had been turned into a tri-plex during the depression of the 1930s, and still had two front doors and an entry on the back left over from that time. In 1980, we watched Mt. St. Helens erupt from the front yard of our Victorian house.
When gang violence in North Portland became a serious threat in the mid 1980's, we sold that house and moved to the west side of town, the side of town I'd grown up on. Our second house was a post World War II starter built in 1948. Our closing papers included CC&Rs that had never been changed to reflect modern anti-discrimination laws. I was shocked to see the illegal requirement we not sell our home to anyone of Jewish, African, Irish, or Asian descent. Fortunately over time those old conventions had been outlawed and the neighborhood we moved into was much more diverse than was originally intended. We lived on a tree lined street with a massive yard that measured 80 feet by 150 feet. The house itself was a very efficient 900 square feet in size. We soon outgrew it, and in a rising market, we had enough equity within a few years to buy a bigger, 1957 daylight ranch in a nearby neighborhood.
Our daylight ranch was on a south facing hillside, in a neighborhood where many of the original owners still lived in the same homes in which they'd raised their families. It was a pleasant place to live with a mixture of younger families like ours moving in and retired couples, widows, and widowers still active enough to have a neighborhood party to welcome us. We hosted family gatherings and spread out happily in our 2500 square foot home. I planted the flower beds with coral bells and star jasmine. We had a mimosa tree in the back and a star magnolia in the front. Every Saturday from Spring to Fall, Jim cut the grass while I tended the hostas and the bleeding hearts in the shade garden in the backyard. We put up a basketball hoop and a picnic table. My father spent his last Christmas with us there. Our daughter graduated high school from that house. And that's where we brought Jim's ashes home two years later.
Homeownership had its ups and downs. Over our many years of owning homes we had rats crawling up from a broken sewer line at our first house, and we had half the Mimosa tree come crashing down in an ice storm at the last house. No matter what happened, we weathered it together. Jim was out of town when the mimosa tree went. We were on the phone together when the most ungodly crash came from the backyard. Still on the phone, I ran to see what had happened. It was dark outside and I was too scared to go out and look. It wasn't until the next day I could see the extent of the damage. Jim, out of town in Seattle for work, had to wait until I gave him my report by the light of day to see if the house was alright. It was. The tree thankfully missed the house and landed on the concrete patio below.
The sewer rats were interesting. Our 1901 Victorian was built on two lots that were later subdivided. Neither we, nor our neighbor knew when we bought our houses that our sewer line ran through her front yard. It was news to us, and very unpleasant news to our neighbor when one day rats showed up in her yard having escaped the eighty some year old pipe, digging their way to the surface. We, or I should say, Jim laid a new pipe alongside our house and ended up digging a trench that sloped to over six feet deep at the property line where, thankfully the city took over and made the actual connection.
Just so you don't get the wrong idea about me and Jim and homeownership, I'm not describing the kind of picture perfect houses you see in magazines. Our houses were like working laboratories full of in-the-works projects, constantly under the knife of remodeling and generally always works in progress. Even now, I often have a project going, though not so many and not so constantly as I once did. But still I've always envied people who's houses are "done". Maybe someday I'll come to accept I'll never be totally "done" with any place I live. I'll blame it on my being a curious architect. Like the plastic surgeon who can't stop doing one more cosmetic surgery on his wife.
Jim and I lived the American dream together, and for over twenty five years, we owned our own home. There was stability in that, even though things did not always go smoothly or turn out the way they were supposed to. Looking back now, I can see how much homeownership shaped our lives. It gave us a foundation so to speak, a place to hang our hats, a reason to go to work, and a reason to return at the end of the day. We had a good run. Now I've given up homeownership, at least for the time being, and I have to admit I feel somewhat untethered. All those years in houses meant a lot to me and Jim. It meant we were going somewhere, putting a paid off mortgage into our retirement plan. It meant we could do whatever we wanted within reason to our home without consulting anyone. It gave us roots.
Perhaps living the American dream will always include home ownership. Even with all the maintenance and expense, there's just nothing quite like it. It's not for everyone. There are other ways to live for sure. My own parents only owned their own home once for a period of about four years. From then on, they rented. But as my father aged, he had one regret he mentioned occasionally. He said he would have liked to "have had a little house somewhere."
For the time being, until I'm a homeowner again, I have to come up with a new dream, build a new kind of empire, based not so much on where I live, but more on how I live. Lots of people have had to give up home ownership in the last couple of years, and I can sympathize. I'm in the same boat, well not in a boat, literally, I'm in an apartment. But it does make me think. Maybe living the American dream isn't always about having a house. Maybe living the American dream is about something else, and what that is, is still taking shape. For me and Jim, we built our empire together, an empire made of memories. Not what we had in mind maybe, but an empire all the same. In spite of everything, I have an awful lot to be thankful for. And, as Roseanne Arnold famously said as the electricity was turned off when she and her fictional husband Dan couldn't pay the bill, "Well, middle class was fun."
© M.E. Rollins
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