Judith T. Krauthamer -- The Blue House

In the 1920’s Joseph Frankel and William Fox, owner of what was to become the film production company Twentieth Century Fox, built a small community on Long Island. Roughly thirty miles east of Manhattan and very near to the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean, the eight block development boasted 400 homes. The neighborhood was called the Merrick Gables, rumored to be named after Clark Gable. It was a long walk or short drive to what was then a bay; with a shovel and bucket anyone could be a clammer. West coast elite working on the east coast chose to live there, including Errol Flynn and Ed Begley, Jr.

The architecture was distinct: Spanish mission style mirroring early Hollywood. The houses all resembled one another -- Spanish white wash on textured stucco adorned with red tiles-- with arches, verandahs, chimneys, and a flat roof. The single level dwellings and the plots that they sat on were modest. Floorplans ranged from roughly 1100 square feet with a galley kitchen to a larger version with a sunken living room and built-in booth in the kitchen. Canadian maples lined wide streets; every house had a driveway, cement path, and sidewalk.

My mother bought our 1927 house in the early 1950s, making the migration from the city to the suburbs. It was the smallest model, with one bathroom serving its three tiny bedrooms. When she first moved in, she removed the tiles from the roof, put shingles over the stucco, and had the house painted a deep robins egg blue. Getting directions to find the house for her urban friends was easy. Situated in the middle of a pale white beach it stood out like the nearby ocean.

My childhood home was woven into the fabric of my life long before I recognized its intentional design. As a kid in the sixties influenced by social pressure and norms, I was only aware of differences between where I lived and the rest of the southern shore. The modern expansive houses adorning the Atlantic coast of Long Island were spotless; ours was old and small and cluttered. My older sister and I attempted to curate an environment that we thought was socially acceptable among our peers. My mother, however, rejected obvious distinctions in class. She was a math professor and a Times crossword puzzle creator, but above all she was an egalitarian. She defended her right to ignore all the rules of suburban decorum and decor.

Unlike the rest of the Gables neighborhood, our yard was not polished and manicured. Daylilies grew wild, forsythia bushes were oddly shaped and overgrown. The birds picked clean the cherries from the cherry tree, but the backyard apple trees dropped their fruit, which rotted where they fell. The grass was rarely mowed. The leaves from the front towering maples, cherished in the summer but resented in the fall, slept on the front lawn throughout winter.

The interior of our house also defied convention. While most people used their dining room for dinner or meals with guests, ours was the focus, center, and busiest room in the house. The television lived in one corner, seated atop a microwave cart. Our modern Scandinavian table was used for meals, stacking bills, doing homework, and laying out the occasional jigsaw puzzle. Overnight guests would sleep on the trundle bed that doubled as a sofa. At any given time in the evening, you could find my mother sitting on it, simultaneously playing solitaire and writing lectures in her head.

Book shelves were put up across an entire wall from ceiling to floor. It held vases from trips around the world, mother’s doctoral diploma, and magazines of every imaginable ilk. It was an ad hoc library. Surrounded by literature, the room inspired conversation and spontaneity. If ideas were your food for fodder, you felt at home. Conversely, if you were traditional, or simply culturally suburban, the room caused you to feel disoriented. “Where do you people eat?”

Our little blue house was a single story but had an unfinished basement running its entire length. It fell into a general state of disrepair, not from disrespect, but rather because of its long distance from the daily lives of the three of us. When she was a graduate student, Mother made a makeshift office next to and underneath the staircase. She decorated it with a desk fashioned from the old kitchen buffet table and Grandpa’s antiquated veneer cabinet. Neither my sister nor I ever ventured into it. After her death it was there that I found her college notes, divorce papers, high school autograph book, and my sister’s and my birth announcements.

Mother, my older sister, and I spent the majority of our time in a space far too small to contain our private hurricanes and visions. Yet it seemed to suit Mother perfectly after my sister and I moved away to college and into our own homes. She bought a window air conditioner for the dining room and put a skylight in the living room. My sister’s room turned into the ironing-and-guest room and my bedroom became the computer and button-collection room. Bootsie, the cat, was succeeded by Sheba, who lived her fourteen feline years in relative comfort and control of the house.

As the years went by my sister and I would complain that the house needed to be uplifted and facelifted. We unilaterally substituted her instant coffee for a Mr. Coffee pot that loomed in the tiny galley kitchen. Beyond that, mother refused to listen, comfortable in her disarray of furniture, art, notes, and books. She banished the rooftop television antennae to the backyard where it sat like a proud, discarded rig off an ancient sailing ship. Her “new” dining room couch, my thirty year old bed, was held up by several old telephone books. “I’m recycling now” my mother would say proudly of the improvised couch legs. The oven had long since stopped working. “I eat my hot meals at work” my mother would argue. The house remained as it was, exchanging new ideas, accumulating papers, and storing memories.

It took me many years to understand that a woman’s home is the outer layer of her skin and the inner voice of her convictions. Shortly before her premature death, Mother lay in a hospice bed in a hospital. She instinctively knew that she required intense, hourly care from people far more capable than my sister or myself and adamantly refused to leave when we suggested she spend her remaining days at home. A few days before she lapsed into her final coma, Mother struggled to sit up and speak. I fully expected to hear words of wisdom, special advice, or a secret. In a voice frail and low and full of longing she cried, “I’ll never see my beautiful home again."