The Missing Room | Suburban Noir

I grew up in a house with a dining room. I remember Sunday dinners and holidays with china and sterling silver and a tablecloth. My parents still have a dining room in their retirement community home, still host family dinners with the tablecloth, the china, the silver, the crystal.

There?s no dining room in my house. Normally I don?t think about my missing room. I have a strange house. No real family room, no real master bedroom. It?s a house that started out small in 1951 and received eclectic additions from one of the owners. From the looks of some of the angles and the relationship of switches to electrical outlets, he wasn?t a professional builder ? maybe a man who loved his house and loved to build things, and it shows.

The only time I think about the missing room is during family get-togethers when we try to cram more than six people into the eating area of our kitchen. I sometimes feel I?m not quite grown up because I don?t have a dining room.

This morning as I was packing up my lunch for work I remembered the day we first saw this house. On that day, I stood in the kitchen, sun pouring in, looking at my husband and the realtor and had an overwhelming sense that it was home.

After I lost my first house through divorce, I thought I?d never own a home again. But somehow, with good fortune in our jobs, and the fortuitous convergence of a doable price on a strange house, low interest rates, and lots of juggling, here we were ? buying a house.

A few years later, we tore up the 1960s tile, ripped out the mismatched sideboard, and re-modeled the kitchen and eating area. My husband, who loves to cook, felt like he had a new playground.

When I stood there this morning, the room had a glow from the mixture of dissipating fog and eager sun. The street was silent because it?s summer and there?s no traffic to the nearby elementary school.

Nothing was missing ? it felt like home, again.

Is it Suburban Noir? No, but sometimes we human beings aren?t at peace with the missing parts, and then, the dark side comes to light.

Source: http://suburbannoir.com/the-missing-room/

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