The House on the Golf Course

Some things have happened to bring these memories to mind, so I thought I'd write about them as family history, from my own perspective.

When my daughter and her first husband, Nathan, were married, they had been living with me.  Getting on their own meant getting their own place, so after much research, they settled on a pretty nice apartment up on 38th Street in Indianapolis.  (Not such a great area, but not horribly bad then.)  It worked for maybe a year, but then--due to a loss of job(s)--they had to vacate.  They moved in with Nate's parents for awhile (maybe eight months or so)...and then...and then...and then....

Nate was offered a position as superintendent of a golf course out in the country just south of Plainfield:  Friendswood Golf Course.  It was a course that was purchased and built around a very old brick school building.  Nate would have to take a class or two in environmental stuff, but he accepted the position.  The pay was quite low, but one of the perks was a home on the property.  It was an old home, but it gave the newlyweds a place to be, independent of both sets of parents, and since Megan was pregnant by this time, it seemed like an answer to prayer for us all.

Did I mention that the house was old??  Yeah...big time.  The owner was going to have new carpet put in the whole place and so required that NOTHING be put in there until that was done.  But before that could happen, both families converged on the place to see what we needed to do to make the place livable.  The kitchen drawers and cabinets were full of mouse droppings.  The upper cabinets were gummy with accumulated grease and grime.  The floors were slanted, to the degree that if you had dropped a marble, it would have rolled downhill.  The floors were plank and full of holes that looked down into the crawl space.  When we opened the electrical box, there was an electrocuted mouse stuck behind a fuse.   In short, we had a lot to do before the kids moved in!

The first thing I did was obtain pieces of tin of various sizes from a friend.  I personally nailed tin over at least a dozen floor holes.  Then we stuck pieces of steel wool around the plumbing holes in the house--anything to keep the mice out.  We stripped and refinished the birch kitchen cabinets.  We made and bought curtains to fit the house and make a nursery.  We cleaned everything.  (Truth be known, our efforts worked.  Mice were never a problem in that house after that.)

The one thing we couldn't fix was the iron-filled water.  There was a water softener in the house that would take iron-removing salt pellets, but the kids were generally too poor to keep buying that stuff.  The water came out of the faucet looking so bad that no one wanted to drink it or cook with it, so I bought a water cooler for them and went about the business of making sure that they had enough 5-gal. bottles to get through a week.  They bathed in the nasty rust-water, however, so the bathtub looked awful and red and ugly.  We bought a "tubby" thing to put the baby in when she was big enough to put in a tub.  It wasn't pretty....  The snow-white cloth diapers that I had bought for my first grandbaby became orange.  We didn't buy anything white by way of clothing or bedding because it wouldn't stay white for long!!

And then there was Frodo the Wonder Dog.  Frodo was a buff cocker spaniel...a real cutie...but also so totally spoiled and untrained that she toileted in the house, no matter how often she went outside (which apparently wasn't often enough).  Nathan took her on at six weeks.  I begged them both not to take a pet.  Did they listen?  Nooo...  And the end result was that Frodo often piddled and pooped on the brand new carpets in the golf course house...the brand new carpets that my grandchildren would be crawling on...  I hated that.

Then, not so long after my granddaughter (Robin) was born, her brother was conceived.  I had spent hundreds of dollars to give my daughter and family the things that I thought they needed, and even more than what they thought they needed.  I sponsored the Quilt Phase, the Kindermusik Phase, and the Creative Memories Phase of Meg's existence back then.  She was doing all she knew how to do to help improve their financial situation.  It wasn't enough.  Never enough.  Ryan was born in November of 2003.  We cleaned out yet another room of the golf course house--questionable, for sure--to upgrade Robin to a different bedroom while her new brother took the nursery.

There were a lot of happy things going on in that house, but we soon became aware of  problems.  I would put a blanket on the floor in order to play with my grandchildren but noticed that everything felt damp.  After awhile, the excessive humidity in the home became an issue.  The kitchen floor became spongy.  There were mushrooms growing on the wood window sills in the bathroom.  There was mold on the bathroom cabinets and on some of the furniture.  The crawl space under the house was damp but not streaming.  No one could determine what was causing the moisture.  There was no humidifier on the new furnace and no water leaks that anyone could find.  I bought a dehumidifier but even that didn't seem to reduce the dampness by much.  Then, too, Megan would hear scurrying noises in the walls at night...and we noticed winged creatures descending into the defunct house chimney at dusk.  Bats?  Birds?  We all began to wonder if the free rent was worth whatever health risks could be occurring.

Then came the tornado.  It came right down through the golf course.  Thanks be to God, the kids and family took cover--even with the dog.  (I've written about this before.)  A huge tree came down in the back yard, missing the house by mere inches.  Nathan had his work cut out for him on the course.  The grandchildren stayed with me six miles from the carnage, while everyone assessed the damage early the next morning.  Phone and electricity were restored to the golf course house before the first day was over, but it took months to remove all 125 of the downed trees...and then some.  The little old yellow house had no damage, although a barn on the course mere yards away was destroyed.  We were all shaken but grateful that no one was hurt.  The only thing by way of personal property that was damaged was little Robin's outside tugboat sandbox and her Little Tykes jungle-gym-type contraption.

Nathan began to look for other work.  Even with housing thrown in the mix, his income at Friendswood wasn't enough to keep the family afloat.  He was offered a good position near Muncie, IN, that he accepted.  I cried for three days!  They were going to take my grandbabies away!  In any case, at the end of my three-day mourning period, I jumped on the bandwagon to help them move out of the golf course house.  (That's a whole other story.)  That started the Muncie stage of our existence, and I did every bit as much for them there as before...but "helping" now was 1 1/2 hours away.  The new position was much more lucrative, and the kids bought a house.

Meanwhile, getting out of the Friendswood house wasn't so easy.  The non-lease contract the kids had agreed to said that they would repaint the interior of the house upon their exit.  They hadn't been in the house very long--less than two years--but a deal is a deal.  Consequently, Nate's parents (particularly his father) spent a lot of hours and effort, plus expense, painting the interior of the house for whomever would be the next tenants, while the kids were moving and trying to settle in Muncie.  None of the house problems had been addressed, but those walls were sure going to be clean and freshly painted!

I can only speculate what happened at the little yellow house after that.  The new superintendent at the Friendswood Golf Course was to be the owner's grandson who already had a home and wouldn't be using the old house.  My guess is that the owner began to take a look at the house issues in order to prepare it to be rented out.  Before long, rumor had it that the golf course house was unfixable because it would cost too much to bring it up to code.  It would be torn down.  To save the cost of demolition, the house had been offered to the fire department for a planned training burn.  The FD declined.  Why?  Because they found too much asbestos in the place for them to risk releasing the fibers into the air with a fire.  Ack!  My babies had lived in that place!!

Thereafter, all that was left to do was observe the demolition of the little yellow house.  One day, as Megan and family were visiting in Plainfield, Meg and I stopped by the place when one outside wall had been taken down.  It was as if looking into a doll house with all of the rooms exposed because a wall was missing.  As we stood there looking in at the bathroom and nursery from outside the house, we noticed that there were walnuts and walnut shells spilling out of a now-exposed wall interior.  Lots and lots of walnuts!  Walnuts no doubt put in the wall by the furry creatures that Meg had heard over a long period of time.  We each shed a tear or two, remembering that their little family had its beginnings in the house that was soon to be no more. Then we returned to the car and left, never to look back.

And so it is.  That was probably ten years ago now.  Nothing is left to indicate that a little yellow house had ever stood there.  The children were too young to have any memory of the place.  It was an awful house, but for a short time, it was home to some very special people (and a few animals, it seems).  All that love...all that expense...all that hard work (including freshly painted walls)...have gone the way of all earthly things.  But the memories...ah, the memories...will remain with us forever.