My Dream House

It isn’t, of course, and it shan’t be,
For years and years where passing eyes might see.
Yet deep in the depths of will be, must be,
Already it stands complete—
Pine trees hiding the drive,
Sheltering the doorway and nooks,
Rugs on the floor—dishes, pictures and books,
A wide fireplace and a winding stair for looks.
Surely you’ll love it, this Dream House of mine,
And visit it often any season or time,
When drowsy south winds hum prairie tunes,
Or biting north gales tempt fireside runes.
In summer a door open wide—
In winter a lantern outside!
My Dream House, come true!
(1920s)

Technically, this is one of mom’s most complete and perfected poems, I think, each word working well to flow with the next, sketching out the colorful, concrete details of the dream, each line building the theme. The poem was typed with only four small corrections and three phrases added in pencil, which suggests that she had worked on it by hand several times before finally typing it, and then made a couple of changes. This was probably written while she was in college or just afterward, in the early 1920s. It shows her romantic nature and deep sense of home and hearth, of having a warm place where others are welcome, a place with mature “pine trees” hanging over the driveway and the house, with “pictures and books” and a “wide fireplace.”

Mom kept this dream alive throughout her life. She seemed to literally will it onto each home or apartment we moved into—and there were dozens! Each house or apartment was to her, “not just a house, but a home,” (her words, always!) and she made certain that we hung family pictures and set out the books in the bookcases. She was always looking forward to anyone who came to visit. She wanted to share, not just her physical space, but her entire dream of place, the feeling of being “at home.” The phrase “fireside runes” is significant. “Runes” is an old word and it means poems, verses or songs. Only a student of poetry or a literate person would know this word and be capable using it appropriately, as she does here. It conjures up images of people coming in out of the cold, warming up next the fireplace, and sharing stories of the day—maybe as mom remembered her father and brothers doing during the cold winter months on the farm in Minnesota. Since her grandfather was an Irish barroom balladeer, the singing of Irish runes had to be part of the family mindset. Symbolically, she re-enacted this scene every time a visitor came to the house—preparing warm tea or coffee, cookies or cake, and sitting at the coffee table, visiting, attending, listening—and, if we had one and it was winter, near the fireplace with the logs burning! Overall, the poem captures mom’s eternal optimism and hope and the intricate detail of her imaginary world.

The final line is a poignant and sad one for me. In 1989 when I visited mom in her first convalescent home (St. Francis Home) in Orange county, I knew I had to do something to get her out of there and into a real home again. Though it was a nice Catholic home with a large garden and the nuns were friendly, mom had to shuffle her way down the long corridor to the chapel (Bob had done his best to get her into this home). Her feet hurt her immensely by then. When I saw that she had to sleep in a narrow room with a bed four feet from a stranger and her feet hurt her every time she went to eat or to visit the garden, I set out to buy a home through the VA in Fresno. I brought her up within a month or two to live in an apartment wiwth me until we could move into the home.

The home on Fedora Avenue was my final effort to get mom into, if not her Dream Home, a comfortable home for her last years. The move worked, I think, for she loved the grape vines and the pomegranate tree and all the shrubs. We planted pines in the front that did hide the front doorway and the small porch. She’d sit there among the geraniums and watch the neighborhood kids pass by on their way to and from school. All the family came over to help to make the place comfortable for her. Don built a long ramp so she could get out into the back yard easily. Jerry and Bob put some special hand bars in her bathroom, and the girls all helped to get her room and the kitchen organized so it looked homey. And the bookcases—we had several in each room, a large window looking out into the gardenesque back yard where one summer we tried growing corn and peas and beans and carrots and strawberries. The “we” was always me by then, though, for mom was too unsteady to do any gardening. The dog I got from the pound ate the corn (Bob called him Corn Dog!) and most of the vegetables didn’t produce much, though each day we’d check to see how they were doing. Mom put her statue of St Francis in the corner under a tree so she could see it from her window.

We only lived there a few years, mom and I and Cory and Devon, when they came over, but it was “home,” her last in her fading years and one that left her with good memories. When we finally moved her to the very nice Armenian Home in the countryside of east Fresno, she had a spacious room with a bed by a large window. Outside was a lemon grove. There the “bird with the red eyes,” which she said had followed her from the Fedora home, perched on the branches everyday and looked in on her. That was the same bird she saw flying high overhead the afternoon before he died. She stayed in the Armenian Home for about a year before passing away February 24, 1996. The staff there loved her and respected her as very unique and uncomplaining. They missed her when she finally passed away. Though it wasn’t exactly her Dream House, the Armenian Home was ranked as one of the best rest homes in the state and, in the end, it did get her back into the country, which she very much appreciated.