Last one to Vanish

The third home was Lanny’s home. Before we were married, he told me he wanted to live in a cave above a river in a dark forest. We could live on walnuts and fish. I laughed. The man hated fish. He caught them and cleaned them, I prepared and ate them.
I think I’ll leave out the part about the rental we had in Fall City. It was a nice home, but a rental. When we drove to the rental, our daughter screamed, “Mom, you brought us to the boonies.” She was really unhappy as her high school band was marching in the Rose Parade and we were no longer in Phoenix. Our teenage son was in shock. He had not believed we would really move.
The house prices in Washington stunned us. It took several months to sell our Phoenix home and find one around the Seattle area. I finally found one outside of a small town called North Bend in the Snoqualmie Valley. It only had two bedrooms (we had two children, my mother-in-law, and a foster son teenager (no I’m not going into the details how all that happened), but there was an unfinished guest house with two rooms.
One walked up the steps of the front porch to enter the house. The door entered into a hallway that led down to the one bathroom. On the left was the main bedroom, and then the second bedroom. A door in the second bedroom led out to the laundry and storage area that had once been a kitchen and porch area. They had installed a glass mosaic of a duck in a panel that had been installed from the ceiling in the middle of the hallway. There was a door to close off the view of the winter wraps hanging in the second part of the hall.
A wrought iron railing was on the right side of the hall when you entered. That looked down into the huge living room. Three concrete steps led down to the main floor. A river rock fireplace covered most of one wall. A picture window looked out onto the North Fork of the Snoqualmie River, and the northern wall was covered with old fashioned wood windows that could swing outward in warmer weather. There was another bookcase on that wall and more bookcases under the wrought iron railing. The kitchen (if one could call it that) had a total of four metal cabinets by the sink and two wooden cabinets by the patio door which again looked out over the river. A Dutch door led out to the back. Said door had bear scratches on the outside. The kitchen sink was too low for even this short person. The granddaughter of the women who owned the house was living there with her boyfriend. They told us they had been trapped for three days when the Snoqualmie River had flooded. We should be sure to have plenty of water, food, and cigarettes if it happened again. The good news was that the river had stayed one foot below the house. The water was brought into the house via a line into the river and a pump. There was no storage tank. When the river flooded, it would tear out the line and sometimes the pump which would then need to be replaced.
What it did have was walls of knotty pine paneling that were not even being milled in 1976. The ceilings were of oak and the underneath the carpet, maple flooring. The kitchen had disgusting, dirty white pressed ceiling tiles. The lighting fixture in the living room was a hand crafted wagon wheel. The oil furnace was underneath the house.
The yard was filled with rhododendrons, azaleas, a dogwood tree, a tulip tree, a peach/plum tree, a regular plum tree, both blue and red huckleberries, cedar, spruce, fir, holly, thimble berries, strawberry bushes and overgrown blackberry brambles. There were even boysenberries and gooseberries. We were assured there was a chicken house underneath the blackberry brambles.
We let my mother-in-law have the main bedroom, our daughter the second. We took one of the rooms in the guest house and the two boys the other.
The guest house was finished first. There was a bathroom, complete electrical wiring throughout, carpeting and tile, plus curtains, and a small area for toaster oven, microwave, and small refrigerator. We moved back into the main house.
The first thing we had to do was replace the fuse box. It was still using paper fuses. I’m serious. When one went out, they all did. It took years, but gradually we were able to remodel everything and put in a well with a storage tank for water. No longer did we have to carry up water from the creek if something went wrong with the pump. Yes, there was a large chicken coop under the blackberry brambles. I dug out blackberry roots as large as my forearm. I also found more rhododendrons buried under the brambles.
The living room was so large it held an old fashioned, upright piano, a twelve rifle gun case with four drawers and four doors, a huge sofa, recliner, and an old fashioned teacher’s desk that also held my typewriter. The fireplace had so many ledges and nooks it soon held our antique clock, ceramics, old jars, and pictures. The kitchen underwent two transformations. The first when Lanny moved the door and bookcase to make access into the kitchen easier and he installed smoke damaged cabinets from an apartment complex. I cleaned every one of them before they went into the house. The next was when he rebuilt all the cabinets, and closed in the window that looked into the laundry room with new paneling. The white ceiling tiles were removed and the kitchen rewired. They had strung the wires below the beautiful wooden ceiling.
Over time, our health insurance costs sky-rocketed. I went to work to either pay for the insurance or receive insurance through the employment. I wound up at Nintendo of America, a dream job that paid me to talk, read, write, and play games; plus, the pay was great and the insurance coverage wonderful.
The fourth heart operation robbed my mother-in-law of the ability to live with us and she entered a care facility. Lanny’s arthritis continued to worsen and his working in the cold, damp winters of the Pacific Northwest became less and less. After his mother passed away, we began to look for a retirement home back in the desert.
We finally decided the homes in Twentynine Palms were more affordable than those in Phoenix and our daughter and grandchildren would be near. We hated to leave our son and grandchildren in Washington, but felt we would be able to visit at least once or twice a year.
The owner next door, bought our home for their daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. The young woman declared, she had always “loved” our home. A huge earthquake delayed our leaving Washington on the day we thought we would, but we did leave the house.
I have since discovered that the family made a mansion out of their house next door and tore down the house that we lived in for twenty-five years. The only thing I regret is that beautiful, unique kitchen that Lanny built. The land is still there, but the house is no more.