A Penguin in the Orchard

A Quiet Celebration

We celebrated another quiet anniversary at my house yesterday. It was September 29, 1997 that we moved into our little blue house.

No big deal, right? It is, after all, the American Dream to own your own home. Our path to home ownership was just a bit out of the norm.

In 1997, I was closing commercial mortgages for Aegon USA in Cedar Rapids. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars crossed my desk during my time there, secured by the great income streams of retail properties and developments all over the country. With cheap money and the stock market on the rise, everyone who had money wanted to get more and get it more cheaply. I’ve estimated that I closed somewhere in the neighborhood of $350 million in mortgages in the 3 1/2 years as a paralegal.

For all the money flowing through my cube, I was making a considerably substandard wage. Our 600 square foot apartment barely held us. Built in the early 1960s, it had doors that were so narrow we could barely pass, let alone carry our handicapped daughter through them. The couple upstairs was loudly and almost frighteningly in lust. The large guy next door had a huge dark swastika tattooed over the full width of this chest. For all that, we were paying nearly retail rent - close to $12 per square foot per year.

One evening, I loosened my tie in the kitchen and asked my wife how the parent-teacher conference had gone that day.

“Well, it was pretty interesting. Margaret suggested maybe we could look into Habitat for Humanity. She thought our income might qualify.”

There was a long silence while I rolled the possiblity through my head. I always thought Habitat was for, well, homeless people. I thought less of our chances than Margaret apparently did. And, admittedly, there was a bit of male pride that bristled at the hint of providing poorly for my family. The topic sat undiscussed for a few more days.

A week or so later, I came home to find my wife deep into paperwork at the kitchen table.

“What’s this?”

“Well,” she started, “I called the local Habitat last week and this is the application.” She paused, twirling the pen slowly between her fingers. “What’s the worst that can happen? I doubt that we qualify, so the worst is they’ll tell us no.”

She was right. I turned and looked at the water backed up in the kitchen sink. “Sink again?”

“Yep. Right on schedule.”

“Yeah. You’re right. And, hey - you’re filling out the paperwork, right? How can I argue?”

What transpired over the next few months transpired very quickly in a series of little mental snapshots. Serving coffee to the two members of the Family Selection Committee who visited our apartment. I saw their eyes as they looked at the doors, the tiny bathroom, the kitchen. Those eyes held a look of surprise and, yet, of hope. They held my daughter’s hand and talked to her as they’d talk to any other precious nine-year-old. The quietly optimistic phone call two days later from those same committee members to let us know we were being recommended for a house. The cautious and breathless air in that apartment on the night the Executive Committee met. We sat, my family of three, in the living room, watching TV without really watching. And how we cried when the call came.

It was June. Our groundbreaking was set for August, and we dove into helping build the two other houses that were going up at the time. I became intimately familiar with a 22 oz. framing hammer and the feel of a leather tool belt slapping my hip, with speed sqares and sixteen penny nails, and with the community of volunteers who helped with nearly every build. Our end of the bargain was 250 hours of sweat equity each - hours spent in helping with the current builds and our own.

On September 13 we stood on our little plot of ground, now occupied by a deceptively small slab of concrete. The colors were chosen, the floor plan was done, and the crowd of 100+ volunteers was gathered. It was 7:45 am. By 9:30, the house was framed. By noon, the roof trusses were in place. By 3:00, the windows and doors were in and the house had a tidy Tyvek wrap. And, by the time we left at 6:00, more than 40 people had smiled and laughed and pounded their way to a finished shingled roof. We started the day with a slab and ended it with an enclosed stick-built structure.

Sixteen days later, we were arranging the furniture in the living room.

It seems a bit trite and cliched to say that Habitat changed our lives. But some of the ways it’s changed us beg for notice.

Six months after we moved in, I became a full time programmer. I realized I had some skills that would earn a bit more than slave wages and, with a low-payment no-interest mortgage, was able to justify the change. It hasn’t paid off as I’d hoped, but I’m better for taking the risk.

We are stable. We’ve lived in our home longer now than any other single residence in the nineteen years I’ve spent with my wife. When I think of moving, I also think of the sweat of strangers that went into this home. It’s really not just ours - it’s theirs, too. Any thought of moving vanishes when I remember that, deep in the living room walls, a supporting 2×6 bears our signatures and the signatures of many of the volunteers who helped build this house. That sure makes the grass greener on my side of the fence.

And it’s bound us inextricably into the Iowa City community. I still see those volunteers at the bookstore, at the Friday night concerts in the pedestrian mall, passing on the road, at the gas station. This is my community. They made it so.

So how did we celebrate five years in our home? We sat, my family of three, in the living room, next to the signed supporting beam, watching TV without really watching.