My Ancestors Come to Asheville

A year ago, we bought our lovely Asheville home from a couple who lives across the street from us.

At the time, coming from Southern California, as Hubby and I were, and from a law degree, as I was, this fact lay somewhere between discomfiting and horrifying.

To Californians, real estate transactions are brutal affairs, gladiator-like battles in which the putative purchaser balances her desire for a home -- any home she can afford -- against her equally strong wish to prove her superior negotiating skills. Offers are made and countered; inspections are performed and righteous demands for repairs are made; suspicious and often nasty opinions are formed about the party on the other end. Only when closings have closed and pictures have been hung does the animosity begin to drift out the gorgeous original windows as the new homeowner settles into a sense of ownership that owes nothing at all to previous inhabitants, except when they occasionally pop up to haunt her in poorly-installed ceiling fans and Code-violating plumbing.

Living -- as I have for a year now -- in Asheville, however, the fact that the former owners of my home live across the street from me does not seem terribly startling. This couple who lived in our house for six years, meticulously and flawlessly fixed the place up, and entered into a major financial transaction with us, now shares photo albums chronicling the restoration of our ninety-year-old home as we sit on their porch sipping wine. They give us advice on how to winter-proof our windows, tour the house with us to point out oddities that would otherwise have us cursing and freezing as, for example, winter approaches and we are unable to figure out how to get the heat to rise to the second floor, and kindly refrain from tearing up every time they see what our neglect has done to their garden.

The only time I have regretted the proximity and neighborliness of the former owners of our home is when I invite them inside it.

Invariably on these occasions I have dumped a basket of clean laundry on the living room floor with plans of folding it some time hours (or sometimes days) hence. I have failed to pick up the detritus of a small boy's previous evening of play: wooden farm animals strewn across the rug; the dog-hair-ridden pillow we leave on the floor to hide the big hole Audrey dug in our carpet thrown to the side so it can both look ugly and fail to do its job of concealment; Dr. Seuss books distributed over every available surface; and a half-empty sippy cup of curdling milk resting on the back of the couch.

"I'm sorry it's such a mess," I say apologetically. "It really isn't always this bad."

"Don't worry," our neighbor always says with great care. "It took us years to decorate."

Notice she never says, "We were this messy too," or, "Mess? What mess? I'd never know a toddler lives here." And who can blame her?

But today, for the very first time, I wish I had an excuse to invite her in.

It's not that the place is spotless -- far from it. In fact, there's a dresser sans drawers sitting in the middle of our foyer. But it's antique. And its resting place is well earned, as Hubby managed to carry it on his own from the minivan he drove last night from Louisville, Kentucky, to our front door.

(No, I'm not afraid to move a little furniture with my husband. It's just that you're not supposed to do it when you're pregnant. So, you know, I carried table linens instead.)

Rather than bemoan the fact that a dresser is sitting in our foyer, every time I come downstairs or walk from living room to kitchen I stare at it as I pass, marveling at its -- its -- what?

We have other antiques in our home, mixed in with the jumble of Ikea couch, various pieces of artwork chronicling the development of my brother-in-law's career as an artist, and the water-stained coffee table my parents received as a wedding present. Antiques alone don't mean much to me, other than a musty-scented image of someone else's grandmother crocheting doilies and generations of strangers doing things I can't even imagine on the green armchair in our living room.

This dresser, however, is an antique from my family. So is the inlaid set of drawers now temporarily resting next to Hubby's desk (incidentally made by my maternal grandmother right around her 70th birthday). So are the slightly faded, posed portraits of past generations of my paternal ancestors that I spent this morning scattering about the house, and the framed postcard written by my great-great grandmother, newly arrived in the United States, to her family back in Germany. Even the far newer wall hangings that had never particularly wowed me when they adorned the walls at my grandfather's apartment -- I took them because, frankly, we have a lot of blank walls and never bothered to remove all the empty picture hooks left by the former owners -- look lovely and sophisticated and at home on our walls.

This morning, when I came home from dropping The Boy off at school, the jumble of items we acquired while cleaning out my recently deceased grandfather's apartment this weekend was frightening, anxiety-producing. Clutter makes me anxious; clean, neat spaces leave me calm. Unless, of course, the clutter has been there so long I don't notice it. But even then my eye is far too likely to alight on it without warning one day, making me jittery and depressed and certain I'll never live in a house that looks like the ones featured in Vanity Fair articles about beautiful homes that I never read because I find them boring.

Today, however, I moved with a purpose. I separated things into piles, swept from room to room putting them in places -- actual places they belong. I put the framed photograph of my great-great grandmother on top of the inlaid set of drawers, alongside a picture of my grandfather in his Army uniform looking jaunty (if, he used to say with a touch more pride than humor, the oldest Lieutenant the U.S. Army ever saw). I rested the hand-painted picture of my great-grandmother cradling the one-day-to-be-army-lieutenant as an infant on the built-in railing next to the built-in china cabinet (in which we have -- thanks to my ancestors again -- real china).

And as I wandered through my home -- past the bureau in the foyer and the box-upon-box of vacation slides Hubby rescued from the trash pile and the table linens monogrammed with my great-grandmother's initials -- I felt more at home, among these things from my grandfather's home, than I ever have.

These items that meant so little to me resting in their familiar spots in my grandfather's apartment have taken on a new life. They are here for my son and his soon-to-be-sibling, certainly. But they are also here for me, a reminder of where I have come from, and a welcome piece of myself that I never quite cared about before.

And so, last night, as we cruised down I-40 in our rented Nissan Quest with the Elmo DVD playing in the back seat, I brought my ancestors to Asheville. Home with me.

If you'd like to read more about my trip to Louisville with an active toddler, and what it taught me about being flexible in life, go to YogaMamaMe's story "Travels with Toddler."