The House That Built Us

The group text came early in the morning before my 65th birthday, while I was in Cancun celebrating my eligibility for Medicare.

The text was from my youngest brother, Jeff, to our other five siblings and me.

JEFF: “So, this happened last night…”

He attached a picture of a smoldering building with smoke billowing into a grey sky, and snow on the ground. The roof was caved in, and what was left of the second floor looked a lot like a dinosaur. The chimney still stood tall in the middle of the burning rubble. The front porch roof seemed undamaged, but the siding had buckled from the heat. The screen door was flung open, as was the inner door, showing nothing but black inside. The perimeter was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape tied to trees and the satellite dish.  

Crime scene. Yeah, that seemed appropriate.

This smoldering heap was all that was left of our childhood home, the house our mom had moved from just three years earlier. She had been in that house for 56 years. She and our dad had raised two of his kids from his first marriage and the seven offspring they procreated: Dick, the eldest. Then, in birth order:  Lynn. Me. Alan. Steve. Jeff. And Karen, the youngest.

Four boys, three girls. Mom had a baby every two years from age 18 to 30. 

After we all figured out it was our old house in Summit Grove, Indiana, and were told that the family who lived there had all escaped safely, the grieving began.

And the jokes.

DICK: “It was just a matter of time. Just glad Mom wasn’t there. That place was not safe. Grateful they got out.”

JEFF: “Only fatalities were 4,500 ladybugs.”

ME: “More like 45,000.”

And later, after someone spoke with the neighbor who had sent the photo to Jeff.

JEFF: “They say it was an electrical fire.”

ALAN: “And we have no idea who, if anyone, did any rewiring in that house. Right?”

ME: “Right. <Winky face>”

STEVE: “I never touched it.”

KAREN: “I know someone added a light switch for a teenage girl when he was in college.”

ALAN: “You don’t know anything!” 

And then “Wow! It’s weird how sad this makes me.”

KAREN: "Same." 

DICK: “No more childhood home.”

We all felt it. Even if the house was old and always full of ladybugs.

Memories are Fireproof

Not everyone has a childhood home. A house that built them. A place they grew up in, moved away from, and came back to. Sometimes just to drive by, and smile, and sigh.  

Some people grew up always on the move with their parents’ jobs, or maybe just moved around within the same area. Never in one house long enough for roots to grow deep.

I’m not one of those people. Our roots were as deep as the dirt-floor basement was scary. My family moved into the house that built us when I was four. The year was 1966. I was the third child born to my mother and father. Two of my six siblings were born after we moved in. And even though I had one home before that move, most of my childhood memories were made in the house in Summit Grove, Indiana. Most of the memories are good. Some not so good.

I was a four-year-old with two older siblings, two younger siblings, and two older half-brothers, moving into the house that would be my mom’s home for the next five and a half decades. Or as Abe Lincoln would say, two score and sixteen years. At any rate, a long time. 

I should probably mention that the house was not big. Certainly not for nine people to live in. But it was home… all 990 square feet of it. The house was built in 1909 and was once used to house railroad workers.

On the ground floor, the house had a kitchen, a living room, two small bedrooms, and a very small bathroom. The upstairs was one long room, likely where the railroad workers' cots were kept. For our family in 1966, the conditions were not much improved from those times.  The big space would serve as the sleeping quarters for four boys, ages three to 14.

To call this a bedroom would be a stretch. In those early years, there were no beds. Just mattresses or pads on the bare wooden plank floors. There were no closets, no electrical outlets, no heating vents, and two bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

The pull cords to turn these bulbs on and off were either broken off or never existed. So, the lights were turned on and off by twisting the bulb. Easy enough for turning on when the bulb was cool to the touch. But to turn the light off, we learned quickly to lick our fingers first, unless you wanted to singe your fingertips, which we all did at least once.

As for the downstairs bedrooms, one was for Mom and Dad, and the smaller one was for the only two girls: my sister Lynn, who was six, and four-year-old me. Our four-month-old brother Steve was in a crib in our parents’ room.

Our small bathroom had a toilet, a shower stall, and a sink. But compared to our former home, which had no indoor plumbing, this was a very big step up from an outhouse and an outside spigot to draw water that we carried in for cooking, drinking, and bathing.

Low Level Upgrades

As time passed, our older half-brothers “aged out” of the household – both dropped out of school and joined the armed forces – and my two younger siblings came along, keeping the number of kids in the house at seven from 1965 to 1978. 

Small improvements were made to the upstairs. My dad and whoever helped with the construction were certainly not professionals, but they divided the large space into two rooms by adding two walls about four feet apart, leaving a short “hallway” between the two rooms with doorways on opposite sides, which made closets in each room.

The word “makeshift” might be appropriate to describe our rooms.

The walls upstairs had an angled section due to the roof pitch. A US Army Veteran with 18 months of service, Dad showed his patriotism by painting the angled sections blue and the vertical sections red, leaving the ceiling white. So red, white, and blue, just like our great nation’s star-spangled banner.

The blue was lighter than the USA’s flag blue, and the red was more like maroon. So maybe it was just on sale. But it seemed patriotic because Dad said so.  

The front part of the second floor was for Lynn and me. The boys walked through our “room” to get to theirs, and there were no doors. So, forget about privacy. We had none.

The bedroom that Lynn and I had occupied downstairs became the room for the two youngest Carty kids, Jeff and Karen. Jeff would move upstairs with the boys when he was about 4 or 5, leaving Karen in her own room next to Mom and Dad. And everyone had to walk through that room to get to the one bathroom.

While I knew the house was small for a family our size and we were poor, most of the memories there are good ones. We had bikes, room to roam, woods to explore, and neighborhood kids to play with. As teens, we had friends spend the night, and if they noticed the lack of conveniences like heating vents and light switches, they never mentioned it. I don’t ever remember feeling embarrassed by our living conditions, even though we knew most of our friends had it better. It was just home.

Growing up in – and out of – Summit Grove

In 1978, my older brother Dick got married and moved out. Within a year, I left for college, and Lynn got married. Karen moved up to our old room, and someone may or may not have added a light switch in her new room. (Alan! It was Alan!)

Her old downstairs bedroom was converted to a larger bathroom. The old bathroom became a much-needed laundry room. Prior to that, you could find the Cartys at the laundromat every weekend. Everyone but Dad, of course.

One by one, my younger siblings moved out, leaving Mom and Dad in their empty nest.

As adults, the house in Summit Grove continued being the place to go home to. Filling that small house to the brim with our spouses and children, surrounding our parents with their descendants.

And Mom filled us with her delicious country cooking. Wanda Carty’s fried chicken with biscuits and gravy was legendary. Turkey dinners always included homemade mac and cheese made with Velveeta, and stuffing made from Italian bread from the IGA in nearby Clinton.

The woman could whip up a pie in a matter of minutes. Chocolate meringue, banana cream, pumpkin, coconut cream, and custard were her claim to fame, but she probably made every kind of pie you could think of.

For more than four decades, we gathered for Thanksgivings, Christmases, birthdays, weddings, and funerals, including Dad’s in 2003.

After our dad passed away, the house in Summit Grove became “Grandma’s house.” She added a garage, which my dad would have never approved. (and told her so many times!) Using the same makeshift construction method as the upstairs remodeling, a piece of plywood with two hinges was used to close off the upstairs unless someone was visiting, which became less and less frequent. As our kids grew older and had more activities, and our jobs evolved into careers, gatherings with more than two or three of us became rare.

But visiting Grandma was something we all still did a few times a year. We'd push that plywood door open and fasten the two hook-and-eye latches to hold it up. We'd put clean sheets on the beds, open the vents, and vacuum up all the dead ladybugs. So many ladybugs! I can still remember the sharp, musty smell of those ladybug carcasses. 

Mom's grandkids loved hanging out in the house, on the porch, in the yard, and in the little two-block neighborhood of Summit Grove where their parents had grown up.

The Last One Out... 

We all grew older, and since Mom had an obvious head start into old age, our concerns about her being by herself in that house in Summit Grove grew. So, after the COVID Pandemic, she moved to Florida to live with my older brother Dick and his wife Paula.

Our childhood home went on the market for the first time in 57 years. It sold for 43 times more than Mom and Dad had paid for it. 

Meanwhile, down in the Sunshine State, Mom moved to her own place… into assisted living, just a few miles from Dick and his wife. Now we all travel to Florida to see her.

I did a small watercolor painting of the house and sent it to her. Sadly, she has dementia, and her memories of the house in Summit Grove, as well as most everything else, have become foggy. She points to the painting and says, "They say I lived in that house."

Some days are better than others. Isn’t that usually the case?

In February of 2026, sixty-one years after it became my childhood home, the house in Summit Grove was gone.

The ladybugs went up in smoke, but thankfully, the family who lived there all got out safely. And we all realize that is the important thing.

But it still stings to know that we have no more childhood home to drive by, reminisce, and say, “That’s the house that built us.”