My parents, both native Texans, bought our home on Oram Street in 1958 from a great-aunt. My father lived in this house for most of his childhood, and later as newlyweds, he and my mother lived in the garage apartment, where I was supposedly conceived. So I like to say that I have lived here since before I was born. For 14 years I flew the nest for New Orleans and New York, returning in 1992 to hover over my ailing parents. Following their departure to the Heavenly Fields, I inherited this house in 1997 and became the third generation of my family to call this house a home.

The house is a two-story red brick, originally built in 1925 as a boarding house. The 2,435 square feet structure has a symmetrical facade, a somewhat serious face, designed in a simple, practical style. As a utilitarian touch for the boarders, every room upstairs has a little sink –great for my art studio now, of course. Friends who visit have often said that the house "feels" like a European bed-and-breakfast. The upstairs can totally be closed off from the downstairs. When I was growing up, my parents rented the four rooms upstairs, and the doors dividing up from downstairs were always the mysterious off-limit passageways to other worlds, kept closed and locked. Now, both floors are my free reign, but thank goodness those doors were designed to shut off the stairwell, because they make it so easy to zone the house for efficient energy conservation. This is a practicality that you won't find in the popular new 3-story townhomes being built in this area, which are so hard to cool and heat due to the open stairwells.

I remember this house from before my parents owned it, because we used to come visit my great-aunt when she lived here. That would've been before I was seven years old, so my memories are a child's memories: the chandeliers, which have a rather haunted house styling; the woodpecker doorknocker, long gone, and the dark bricks, which give the house a somewhat brooding expression. I also remember my great-aunt's cat Sandy, who seemed to own this house with as much of a commanding presence as my brittle old aunt.

When we moved into the house, the neighborhood was very Leave It To Beaver. Quiet, but at the same time urban, our house was one of many on Oram Street that was a boarding house, so there were always people strolling by, coming and going from the commercial area one block away on Greenville Avenue. Back then, the businesses on Greenville served the neighborhood: small privately-owned grocery and drug stores, a record store, a dimestore, a shoe repair shop, a tailor, a barbershop, a hobby shop for kids, one little shack of a hamburger stand, a drive-in bar-b-que place, and one bar for the local wino's. The kids could run free, rides bikes in the streets, explore without worries. There was never much traffic and crime was not yet a problem.

Its owners throughout the years took good care of this house, so it came to me with its integrity fully intact. Never renovated, and never updated to central air and heat, I'm still using window air conditioners and gas heaters, primitive by modern standards. But I'm cooler here than many friends who live in more recently constructed houses. Cooler in both summer AND winter. For such an old house, this house looks and feels very substantial, very stable. Its foundation hasn't gone tipsy like lots of old houses. No tilting floors here, it's solid. Repairmen who have worked on it have often remarked about how hard the wood is, that it snaps their drill bits very easily and is hard to cut through. That's because it's from original old growth forests. And the walls here, under the sheetrock, are broad, horizontal shiplap boards. The floors are hardwood in very nice condition. Houses built of such materials are considered so valuable that when they are torn down, they are carefully deconstructed by hand, board by board and brick by brick, and all the materials are resold as vintage for high dollar rebuilds.

Every molecule of this house exudes memories of a happy childhood and my parents' love and protection. That's why I couldn't bring myself to give it up after it came into my hands in 1997. At that point, my parents had owned it for over 40 years. Going through the 40 years of accumulations here was a little like being an archeologist, excavating through the phases of my family's life. It was a little like being a squatter too, providing quite a few natural resources that I repurposed, like the wicker furniture and the tourist souvenir plate collection. But mostly I had to peel off layers that had no resemblance to my own taste, like the wall-to-wall avocado green shag carpeting, the dense drab draperies and the recliner chairs. What remained here from their possessions took on a decidedly different character, and gradually the house started looking more spacious and light, more artfully occupied, less congested with furniture.

Still, I feel as if I occupy two worlds, living here: their world and mine. It's a comforting, grounding feeling for me, this house and its memories. This is like Ground Zero for me, this house. Even during the 14 years I was away, I often would automatically, accidentally list this address as home. It's like the centrifugal force that my life has always revolved around. After my parents died, I always meant to move back to New York, but the way it felt to live in the beneficent queendom of this house is so wonderful that I haven't yet been able to bring myself to leave it.