The House on Crestwood Lane
Richard and I bought the house in 1981 when the neighborhood was still mostly red clay and young oak trees supported by wooden stakes, when the sidewalks were unfinished and the development had the provisional quality of something that had not yet decided what it was going to be.
We could barely afford it.
Richard packed his lunch every morning and I sewed our first living room curtains and we bought most of our furniture secondhand and painted the bedrooms ourselves on weekends, and we planted azaleas along the front walkway because azaleas were hardy and beautiful and cost less than the alternatives. We raised three children in those bedrooms and we paid off the mortgage in 2003 and by the time Richard died in 2019 the neighborhood had become one of the most desirable areas outside Raleigh and houses like ours were selling for close to eight hundred thousand dollars.
Richard left me enough to live comfortably. His pension. The retirement investments we had built slowly over forty years of careful decisions. The life insurance. The house, which was paid for and which I had never thought of as an asset so much as a place, the specific place where our life had happened.
I was not rich in the way my children seemed to imagine when they looked at the house. I still used grocery coupons. I drove an older sedan that I maintained because it still worked and replacing things that still worked had never been something Richard and I did. I waited for sales. I was secure, which is a different thing from wealthy, and the difference matters in ways I would spend several years learning.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
