Jewish Musings, Thursday, November 21, 2024

[peachymom1]

What’s on your mind — how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.

Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:

Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy

And for those of you that stop by to read this thread without posting — you are welcome to, but you are also welcome to chime in. Don’t be shy!

[peachymom1]

Good morning! DH calls his 90-year-old dad every Wednesday and Saturday; DFIL lives about a two-hour drive away, and he’s in excellent health. The only health issue he has is that his hearing is going, so DH has to talk loudly and repeat himself a lot. So I usually know what they talk about (whether I want to or not, LOL).

Last night they talked at some length about the house DH grew up in, i.e., the house his parents bought in the 70s. DFIL vacated this house back in 1977 to move in with his girlfriend, then later he signed title over to DMIL in lieu of paying the bills the divorce judge had ordered him to pay. DFIL went to his old house almost every day for the following 21 years, to ride and take care of the four horses he kept there, until he and his DGF moved away with them to the place where he lives now.

This is the same house DH’s sister alone inherited when their DM died two years ago, when DMIL specifically disinherited DH and DFIL in her will. DSIL sold the house for a very handsome sum, and the new owners have apparently made quite a few changes to the property, leveling out the area where the horses used to run up and down a hill, putting in a pool, building onto the house and patio, etc. etc. How do I know this? Because DSIL has kept up with all the improvements and told DFIL, who has told DH, and they have discussed this at great length. Even though none of the three of them have any ownership or interest in the house now, and DH at least has good reason not to give a horse’s patoot about what state it’s in now.

I find this very puzzling. Why do any of these people care about this house anymore? I asked DH, and he said he just found it interesting, but I wonder if it’s some kind of childhood nostalgia that gives him some kind of good feeling. I plan to ask him more about this. We were teenagers when we met, and I remember that house being full of DMIL’s hoard of useless things piled to the ceiling in nearly every room, and being filthy as well as messy. DFIL was cheating on DMIL since before they bought the house, so it’s not like they had some wonderfully happy family life in that house to look back on.

So this got me thinking that maybe I just don’t understand, because from the time my parents divorced (when I was 4), DM and my sisters and I always lived in rented houses, and we moved a lot, so I don’t have childhood memories of a beloved family home.

Do you? Do you have any special memories of a home you grew up in, or ways it was special to you or your family? What do you remember about a family home? I’d love to hear some personal stories!

[hollygail]

I LOVED yesterday's answers! I used to host when I could (having a few friends or some family over for dinner, things like that), but haven't in many years and no longer have any desire to. But I really did love reading what everyone else had to say!

I have vague memories about the house we lived in until I was 5, and even vaguer memories of the summer house my parents purchased when I was around 3. The summer house was a two-family house; we had the downstairs and apparently rented the upstairs (and I have zero recollection of anything at all about the upstairs). I mostly remember the yard and my running around it. The house was a couple of blocks from the Atlantic Ocean and apparently I cried the first few night we slept there; the story goes that my father carried me (in my pj's) to the beach so I could see the water lapping up onto the beach, and then he walked back to the house. The story continues that I never cried there again, apparently because I knew what was making the noise that had kept me up (or woke me up) originally.

However, I do have other memories of the house where we lived until I was 5. It had a front parlor which my parents used as their bedroom. I remember crawling into bed with them once after everyone was awake and asking my mother how old she was. She said "twenty-one plus" and I took that as a real number. The following year, someone else asked her and she gave the same answer, but I corrected her: "You're 22 plus; remember? Last year you told me you were 21-plus!" Apparently the adults thought that was cute (I don't remember the laughter, only the big smiles).

Then we bought a house in the suburbs during the major home-building era of the post-war "boom." It was also in Queens (one of the boroughs / counties comprising New York City). We were there until I finished 7th grade. I loved that house. It had three bedrooms upstairs, and my parents took the middle-sized one for theirs, putting twin beds into the master bedroom for DS and me. Sometimes I slept in that wonderful twin bed and sometimes I moved into the smallest of the three bedrooms. I don't remember why, only that I didn't do it on a nightly basis but rather on a semi-permanent basis and I have no idea how many times I may have changed bedrooms. I have always said I "grew up" in that house. After we sold it, we rented the downstairs of a two-family house in another part of Queens where I finished junior high and high school. And if you've ever read the Spiderman comics, you've seen the drawings of the high school where Peter Parker attended; that's Forest Hills High School where I also went (and from which I graduated). Also terrific memories not so much of that home but of that school...

[gazelle18]

I have lived in some nice places, and some that were just ok. I thought I’d be more attached to the house that flooded during Katrina, since my children were raised there and we had gotten it fixed up nicely. But it turns out I like the house where we ended up even better! And as much as I love (LOVE) my current home, should, God forbid, I become a widow, I would move into a place that was smaller and easier to take care of.

[lee058]

Good morning everybody. Hope you are all well and SAFE! Please pray for Israel and the USA.

Re today's topic: I grew up in Nassau County, a suburb of NYC. My parents bought their house a few years before I was born for $10K, which was a lot of money back then. It was a small ranch house with a yard. Before the neighborhood was built, there used to be potato farms.

Have a peaceful day, Lee