Girard

While we were getting somewhere in the house hunting department as far as localizing an area, there was a tiny bit of disagreement as to the type of house. We ruled out the Detroit ranches with the tiny bedrooms and high, little windows (I couldn’t see out of them), and any Detroit bungalows had to impress us with a finished second floors and a slightly bigger yard. These styles of houses had been built mid-century when the auto industry was sprawling out all over. I favored the wood-framed houses with porches, separate dining rooms and lots of moldings, but there were issues in those homes we were shown that my husband couldn’t get over. His criteria were a basement and a garage. My criteria included at least three bedrooms and windows I could reach.

One big old white-framed farm house with green shutters I especially loved was on Crooks Road. This has the traffic equivalent of Dempster Street and Valdemara iela. Our kids riding bikes on this street made us nervous, but it was a great old house with a big front living room with a little den off to the side, a separate dining room, lots of exposed, old oak woodwork with actual 10” boards and not nominal 10” boards, three cozy bedrooms, a bathroom that needed love, and an unusually shaped lot. There were two big negatives for my husband the busy street sealed it: The unfinished basement was shallow and the garage was racked. Oh, but that house had such good JuJu! Even now, whenever I walk my Lucy-dog and pass that house I get such a happy feeling! Someone replaced the garage…

Anyway, we were shown a house built in the mid-1940s on Girard Avenue. It had a gravel road and no curbs. I hated that part immediately, but my husband was a little excited because he knew the street. His parents lived on the corner when they first moved to the area in 1974, and they had become friends with a family on the street—who still live on the street. My husband had great memories of playing in their huge back yard. He was hoping this house would have the same type of yard. It did. The lot was huge. Extra wide and triple deep--extremely rare in a community like this. Set back from a nice-sized front lawn with a perfectly shaped, mature sugar maple plunked in the middle, was a ranch. This was not a typical Detroit cookie-cutter ranch, though. It wasn’t like any other house we’d been in (not that was good or bad—just different). The three bedrooms and a bath were tucked on one side of the house with a long living room in front, a dining room sandwiched in the middle, and the kitchen on the opposite side. The back end boasted a huge family room with a cathedral ceiling and equally huge picture windows and door wall that looked out onto a cedar deck the football field-sized back yard. Arborvitaes and tall privet offered privacy from next door neighbors, and at the very end of this expanse stood the biggest, most majestic willow tree we had ever seen. And the forsythia had just blossomed. I remember the yellow that lined the yard.

The yard was pretty even in the soggy early spring, but all I saw was work. My husband saw LAND! The yard scared me to death, and house I wasn’t in love with, either. Its drawbacks: the dirt road, the old kitchen, the pink and black bathroom, one of the bedrooms was without windows because of the way the family room addition was constructed, and (get this) it had no basement. My husband was eager to sacrifice the basement because of blinding visions of building a workshop in the yard,  He told me the dirt road just meant people would drive slower, and then said we should consider building a second floor addition later on as the kids grew. He wanted this house and he was convincing me I wanted it, too. What I wanted was to live as a family again (we were apart for about four months), I wanted to move a truck to Michigan the day after school let out for summer, and I wanted to move said truck into a permanent residence. Time was not on my side any longer! We bought the house.

I’ll tell the story of moving next, but I’ll end this by telling you that we closed and obtained possession of this Girard house about a week before we moved. The kids and I were there in Michigan just for the weekend. On that closing day, though, after playing around and learning about our new dwelling, the four of us camped out in the living room on the thick curly carpet. All in sleeping bags and blankets in the empty house, we snuggled together on the floor and spent the night. For me it harkened the first days in the Big Empty Flat in Aluksne before we had a bed and before kids expanded us. It was a really happy day, and by then I was totally convinced I wanted it, too.