It was two years after the Armistice when Mother saw The House. My Grandmother Brown , a lively, beautiful old lady, was visiting us at the time, and she and Mother discovered it one afternoon when they were out walking. At dinner that night, they tackled my father.

The House was not only for sale, they said, but would cost even less than the one we now owned, so that it would actually be a saving to move. They described how it sat on the hill at the top of Buffalo Street, and Mother kept stressing the view, and how important it was to have room to breathe. Whenever my father asked what the house was like, both my mother and grandmother would say, "Oh, Cliff, it's so original."

My father, being a man, found the description rather ominous, but he consented amiably enough to go and see the house that Saturday afternoon. Bobby and I were to stay home and "amuse" our little sister, but we wanted to see the house too, so in the end even Sally came along. A few weeks before, father had bought our first automobile, a Ford sedan. After taking an half-hour driving lesson from the salesman, he had brought it home proudly to show Mother, and said he was going to take it out on a country road and practice turning around and backing. Mother was charmed and wanted to go along, but Grandmother Brown wouldn't let her. "Nonsense, Kitty," she said. "You have three little children and you can't afford to risk your neck. I'll go with Cliff myself." She came home very bouncy and gay, describing how they'd even missed hitting a cow, and said it was perfectly safe for Mother or any of us to ride with Father. So on that Saturday afternoon, we all piled into the Ford and chugged up the steep Buffalo Street hill to see The House.

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)