This Old House

This is the house my mom lived in for most of her childhood. It's on a little butt-end of Portis Avenue, south of Tower Grove Park.

I have fond memories of this place—Christmas Eves in my early childhood, Easter egg hunts in the backyard, riding my Big Wheel up and down the sidewalk, eating cookies in the living room while watching Scooby Doo. On the second floor, my mom's siblings had affixed room numbers to the lintels, thus naming the rooms 201, 203, 205, etc. There was a balcony off one of the second-floor bedrooms. It used to open onto a staircase that would lead to the backyard, but at some point that was torn down, so the balcony, which had no railing (and was in fact never accessible in my experience) looked out on a sheer drop.

Living in a ranch house in the suburbs, this house was magical to me as a child—partly because I loved my grandma (who lived here, with grandpa) so much, but also simply because of the architecture and atmosphere of the place. It looks pretty shabby now (and was probably pretty shabby back then, too—my mom once told me how ashamed she was of the place when she was growing up), but to me back then it possessed a grandeur that couldn't be found where I lived.

I was impressed by its age. My mom told me one time that the house had actually been moved from another location, which seems a bit unlikely to me now. She also told me that it used to be a two-family dwelling but was renovated for single-family use. I was impressed by its height—four stories, from its dank basement to its mysterious attic, which I never got to explore until my grandpa died (I was about 10; my grandma had died a few years earlier) and my parents and aunts and uncles were cleaning it out and preparing to sell it.

Its location is so out of the way that there's never any reason to drive past it. Yet every once in a while I'll ride my bike over there to take a look at how it's holding up, and to remind myself of the past.