So fallish this morning, the second day of fall. Penelope was so frisky in the cool morning air, she drug me all over Guy Street on her morning walk. Can’t sit on the porch because the roofers are busy as bees tearing 102 years of layers of shingles and slate off the roof. Can’t even see my bird feeders for the big roofing truck blocking my view. But I’ll be so proud when it’s complete.

I am as excited as a child at Christmas with thoughts of giving my family home a facelift. It will be a slow process, as I save for the projects, but worth the wait. I don’t want to modernize her just bring her blushing beauty back.

The Gran, as I call the house, was built in 1920, a wedding present for my grandmother, Margaret Lane, from her father, Guy Handley. The house is two stories, with a two bedroom apartment in the third floor basement. The house has a large two-swing tile porch. The house is sand colored brick with pink grout. I think I’m the only family member who has noticed the pink grout. The original shingles were red. Bet that was so pretty when the house was first built. Can’t wait to see it pressure washed. Most of my days are spent on the porch watching my bird friends on their feeders and writing my thoughts down.

My grandmother gave the house to my mother when she married my daddy. All the grandchildren in the family called my mother Gran Nana and always loved coming to Gran’s house. So I decided to call the house, The Gran. Gonna get me a plaque to put by the door that says “The Gran, established in 1920.”

I bought my brothers’ shares in the house several years after mama died and Chief and I spent every other weekend here till he died in January of 2021. We had planned to eventually move from Alexander City to Roanoke and make our home here. Never thought I would move here without him. I’m slowly trying to feel at home here without his presence. Every weekend we visited Chief would tell me it was like a vacation for him. He loved our weekend visits!

My mother, Rosalyn McMurray, took her first breath and her last breath in this house. She and my Daddy came home here from their honeymoon in New Orleans in August of 1942. My mothers’s sister, Margaret Shaffer, had her wedding reception here and my youngest brother, Thomas, held his wedding rehearsal dinner here. My father, Jimmy McMurray, died here of a heart attack at the kitchen table following a Sunday night family supper. My mama and daddy both came home to this house in their caskets and had their funeral visitations here in the sunroom.

Chief and I were married here in front of the living room fireplace surrounded by our families. Our three children spent and continue to spend joyful days here with all their cousins. My three grandchildren enjoy the porch and birds with me now and all the joyous Christmas dinners our family have shared here and continue to share are cherished memories.

My mother and daddy wrote letters to each other while my mother was in school at Wesleyan College. I have four years worth of their letters and have enjoyed reading them. When my mother’s daddy, Paul Lane, died at the age of 42, my grandmother packed mama and her sister up and they moved back across the street to live with her mother in the Handley home, where my grandmother had grown up. They rented this house out till mama and daddy were married.

In my mother’s letters in her senior year of college, when she was engaged to daddy, she talks all about the house and wanting the renters to move out of “their house,” so it will be ready for them to occupy after their honeymoon. She’s always writing, “It’s our house!” She says she’s found the perfect place for the chicken coop! I love this thought because if you knew her, you’d realize she wasn’t ever visiting that chicken house and wringing their necks! I can’t even imagine her gathering the eggs!

When I was six my grandmother sold the Handley home across the street and then built herself an apartment in our basement. It was so splendiferous and had central heat AND air conditioning AND a color tv. We had steam heat radiators on our floors and opened the windows for air conditioning and sat in front of a black and white tv, usually watching what daddy picked out. Didn’t matter if he was snoring, we didn’t dare change the channel!

I loved to run down the stairs and spend the night with Big Ma. She kept it so cold down there, we slept under blankets in the summer. She had this huge gray tub in the bathroom. I shared a bathroom with my parents and three brothers so I felt like a princess downstairs with her.

I can’t imagine living here as a new bride. In one letter mama writes of choosing curtains and of daddy deciding on a coal furnace for heating the house, and how lucky and fortunate they are that their parents have furnished their home for them. Wish I had a coal furnace instead of the money mongering gas steam boiler! You can hear the money start clinking and piling up when you turn it on.

Tom and I came home from our honeymoon at Mount Cheaha to his father’s art studio in Alexander City. I know I was just excited as he was as I started my marriage journey with a wood stove, a piglet named Henry, and a small flock of chickens.

What I wouldn’t give to relive those days again!