First visit to old family home stirs emotions | THE MOM STOP

I stood on the front steps of a house I'd never been to last week, but it was a front porch that I recognized easily as my family pulled up in our van.

It was during a road trip to Pittsburgh recently to bring my grandmother's ashes to the family cemetery that we made the stop at her family home, the house her parents built after immigrating from Bohemia to the United States 108 years ago. It was the place my grandmother grew up, the home where she lived with her husband and children until 1952.

I knew the brick was red, and the diagonally slanted limestone placed at the porch's corners were a detail I had seen before — but only in pictures.

There is a black-and-white photo of my grandmother, who we called "Bubby," standing on those steps next to her father. It was taken sometime in the mid-1940s. My grandmother was in a belted dress holding a hat in one hand behind her. My great-grandfather, who looked uncannily like my father, stood there proudly his arm around his daughter, wearing a short, fat tie. Smiling.

There were other photos taken on the front steps. One that includes three of my grandmother's four brothers, who all served in World War II. The youngest, Frank, stood in his military uniform. The photo was taken in mid-laughter. One of his older brothers in that photo, Joseph, was dressed in plain clothes. Joseph ended up being the one who died in battle. Of course, none of them knew that would happen then.

And there were the baby photos of my dad, who lived in the home for the first five years of his life. There was a picture of my 20-something grandmother, sitting on the stoop, with her hair wrapped in a kerchief and her cradling a newborn son in her arms. And there was a photo of a diaper-clad toddler — also my father — on his hands and feet, learning to crawl up the steps like a crab.

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Another photo showed my dad around kindergarten-age, wearing a 1950s-style sweater and a bow tie. It's not clear if he was going to school or to church. But like so many of the family photos, he stood by the steps, grinning for a picture.

As I climbed up to the house's front porch, I knocked on the red painted front door, remarking how, with it's three paneled glass windows, it was the same door from the pictures taken so many years ago. But no one was home.

Not that I know who lives there now anyway.

And so I turned around, putting my hand on the railing's limestone corner as I stepped down those steps, turned around, and took a selfie with my cellphone. I stood in the same spot as my grandfather and grandmother once stood, in the same space where my great-uncles once laughed before going off to war. On the same place where my dad first learned to climb stairs.

And I smiled for the camera.

Lydia Seabol Avant writes The Mom Stop for The Tuscaloosa News. Reach her at momstopcolumn@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Headline for March 26, 2023 | THE MOM STOP