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Oak point clubs: we have plenty of room for your pictures and announcements! See Clubs for more information.

When we moved into our home in 1973 our family was Linda and I, 6 year old Deb, and baby Kate not quite yet born. We had to add rooms for the kids upstairs, the living and dining rooms were quite uninhabitable, and we didn't have a lot of money. So, our bedroom, which had incredibly ugly wallpaper, had to get by with a coat of white paint and a promise that we'd fix it up someday.

Somehow someday never came. There were the kids rooms to do, then the living room, and when our bank accounts recovered from that, the outside needed some attention, and then we needed new shingles, and then the potholes in the driveway just got too out of hand, and a hundred other things.. the bedroom took back burner always.

Well, those blank white walls were an attraction for anyone with a pencil or a crayon. We probably started it by jotting phone numbers, but our kids got into it whole-heartedly and really put the history of their lives on our bedroom walls. There was the childish crayoned scrawl "Grammy 3847" at 6 year old height to the left of the back window. A "Kate was here; 86 was the year" was at 12 year old height above our bed. Comments about mean teachers and "cool" boys, protests about the unfairness of the world, a complaint about certain parents making too much noise on weekend mornings, pen outlines of tiny hands, cartoon drawings (my favorite is a full color work entitled 'The Psychotic Monk', shown here), dozens and dozens of telephone numbers, lists of friends and treacherous enemies (ever-changing, of course), little poems and limericks, and a sweet little "I love Mom and Dad" with a "Me Too" postscript from the younger sister.

Many years were recorded on those walls, but eventually the kids grew up and moved out, first one and then the other, and we moved out of that room, claiming the larger space that had been theirs as ours. The room became a spare bedroom for when the kids visited, but the writings and drawings were still there. We talked about painting it, but we both knew we couldn't. I'd sometimes go in there and just stand, looking at the walls and remembering our lives.

And then we decided to move here to Oak Point. That's hard to do after living in the same house for thirty three years, there are so many memories everywhere you look. This was the house our children grew up in; because we married so young, it was the house we grew up in too. It was hard to repaint and redecorate to make it attractive to prospective buyers. But the hardest part of all was that room.

On the day we scheduled the painters to come for that, I got up very early. I found my camera and went into the room. I took pictures of the walls, but mostly I just stood, burning the images into my memory. I have those images and the memories that go with them today. Every now and then I look at the pictures, but I don't really need them. My memories are enough.

We love our new home at Oak Point and we love being here: it was the right move for us. But we can't help missing things now and then, thinking back of Christmases, graduations, other gatherings in the home we left.. but that room, that white walled, graffiti filled room, is the most poignant memory of all. The new owners see freshly painted walls and know nothing of the history hiding underneath, but all of it is there, and all of it lives in our memories.