Over time, 50-year-old house became home

We were going to have a party, a big open house. Come one, come all, old friends, new friends, our children's friends, anyone and everyone who has ever sat at our kitchen table or played in our backyard. We were going to have photographs, faded Polaroids and the square out-of-focus Kodak prints with their thin white edges that fill our old photo albums. And new digital snapshots, too, of all the people who have ever stopped by on posters throughout the house.

And we were going to have a theme. 1958. Johnny Mathis, Connie Francis, The Platters singing their slow, dreamy songs. Hot dogs and hamburgers. Potato salad with real mayonnaise. Seven layer dip. Greasy potato chips. We were going to resurrect an ashtray or two, use them to hold cashews, salted, of course, just to remember old times.

We were going to do all this to celebrate our house turning 50. Anything that lasts 50 years deserves a party, we said. But my husband and I couldn't get our act together, couldn't even complete the list of people we would ask to come.

And so here we are reflecting instead of partying.

My husband moved into our house in Canton on July 3, 1958. He was 12 years old; his sister was 15. He grew from a boy into a man in this house. He lived here when I met him and except for the first six years of our marriage, this has been the place where he has always hung his hat.

He wasn't in love with this house when he was 12. His friends lived in Weymouth. He wanted to stay living there.

And I didn't much like it, either, when we moved in, 16 years later.

It fit my in-laws, this four-bedroom Colonial. It was formal and elegant. It had white French provincial kitchen cabinets and a mahogany dining room set with a sideboard and a big upright piano in the living room.

It was my mother-in-law's dream house. But it wasn't mine.

But we were looking for a house and she was looking to leave this one because her husband had died and the house was too big and the yard work too much. It made sense for us to move in. So she sold it to us for less than she should have and left her dining room set, her piano, my husband's bedroom set and twin beds in another room, plus sheets and blankets and so many other things.

I was 27 years old and didn't want a pink kitchen. So I painted the walls orange, replaced the pink and white linoleum with brown, and got rid of the gold drapes and the mahogany dining room set.

But it was still my mother-in-law's house, and remained her house for years and years no matter how I tried to make it mine.

So when did it become mine? I don't know. When did the boy become the man become the grandfather I sit beside today?

Upstairs where her children slept, my mother-in-law's great-grandchildren now sleep for a night or a few nights when their parents are away. We have cribs in all the rooms, next to the beds. She'd like this.

She'd like the backyard, too, and the new deck overlooking it and the kitchen with its hardwood floor and all the reddish brown woodwork now painted white.

In the beginning, when this house was new, there were three huge oak trees in the front yard and woods all around. No houses next door. No houses behind. No subdivisions off Spring Lane. No Fairview Road.

Cars rattled the wooden slats of the old bridge that used to cross over the railroad tracks, and it was like music, like eighth notes, that sound, a clickety clack you could hear a quarter-mile away.

That bridge is gone, replaced with a new one, the woods are paved, and there's just one thinning oak fighting for its life out front.

And the child who knew all these things, the boy my husband was, has long been a man.

He played ball with his friends in our backyard. Our children played ball with their friends, too. Now we sit on our deck and watch our grandchildren play.

"Happy birthday, house," we say out loud.

Beverly Beckham can be reached at BevBeckham@aol.com.