Family Tree

(This is an updated portion of my memoir titled Starting Lines.)

An old home is often more a memory than a building. When I visited my old hometown of Coin, Iowa, last week I no longer had anywhere to call home here. The place that had housed our family the longest – the last one where I’d ever spent a night, eaten a meal, written a diary page, taken a run – had fallen.

This was the King house. My mother, along with all eight of her siblings, were born here. Mom was its final resident, before age and illness took her to Des Moines to live with her son Mike. Out of respect to Mom, a venerated figure in town, vandals had spared this house. (They hadn’t treated so kindly Grandpa and Grandma Henderson’s last home, taken by arsonists’ matches after it went empty.)

Old age, emptiness and neglect finally made the King house risky to enter, as well as painful for me to see. This house was a hollow and crumbling shell. Long gone were the furnishings, including the dining-room table where Grandma King wrote her weekly family newsletters for almost 60 years and hosted meals for crowds of a dozen or more. Long gone were the voices of delight and despair, from five generations of this family.

A neighbor had now bought this property, with plans to remove the house so he could expand his yard and garden. He had it razed last spring. All that remains where the house stood since the late 19th century is a well-kept lawn. A bulldozer could destroy the place but never the memories housed here, or elsewhere around this town that no longer exists physically as I once knew it.

Everything I would become had started here in Coin. I was born to run and write, but never was told I should do either. The support from this family of runners and running fans, of writers and readers was mostly passive. No relative ever coached me or ran with me. None ever assigned me writing or edited anything I’d written. The Kings and Hendersons simply put me on this path of a lifetime and let me follow it my way, wherever it might take me.

Townspeople used to peek out their windows and wonder, “Why does that boy run all the time?” When I came back later, they looked out and asked, “Why is that old guy still running?” No Henderson or King ever wondered why I started or when I would stop.

In smalltown Iowa of mid-last-century people labored with their hands. They worked the soil, worked with animals, worked on machinery. They couldn’t see the sense of daydreaming on paper. Yet no one from my family ever asked, “When are you going to get a real job?”

What I’ve done has met the approval of the people whose views count the most to me, which is why I’ve keep doing it for so long. So subtle was the early support that I once thought this was all my doing. Only much later did I view the root system fully exposed.

In the 1950s, I planted a tree in the King yard. Grandma instructed me to protect the twig from destructive winds (and children) with stakes and ropes. The tree quickly outgrew its supports to thrive on its own, withstanding all threats of time as it reached higher than the two-story house.

Now the demolition crew has taken the house but spared the tree. It remains as a living symbol of the people and the place that gave me the support to stand and the freedom to grow.

The old family home, with tree at right.

The house is gone, the tree still stands.