This House
That House
Idyllic Lincoln, Nebraska
I grew up in an old house in a nice older neighborhood in Lincoln, Nebraska. There were mature trees of many varieties, and each house on my street had a unique look — no two were the same. I lived within walking distance of many of my close childhood friends, my piano teacher, my dance studio, the gas station where we’d go to buy candy, a cute little neighborhood grocery store, and the public schools I attended.
The dream of the 1920s
I try to be careful about posting photos of houses on the internet, so here is Sheridan Elementary School, taken from their PTO’s website.
The house I grew up in was built in the 1920s. The family who built it were among the first families to own their own home video camera, and the descendants of the family were gracious enough to share some of that footage with our family after they got it digitized. I have DVDs that contain silent movies from Rome and Paris in the early 1930s (because if you had money for a home video camera back then, you also had money to travel abroad), a brand new Zephyr train whizzing by in 1936, and most notably for the purpose of this blog post, footage of my childhood home being built. Would you believe me if I told you that they used horses to dig the foundation of this house? (I can prove it!)
I moved out when I went to college. My parents sold the house about ten years later when they fulfilled their dream of building a new house that my dad, an architect, designed. Their new house is wonderful: it works really well for hosting family gatherings, and the kids can sleep better there than they could in the house built a hundred years ago because the floors aren’t creaky, and each room is a little bit more sound proof. Plus, this new house has a pool, and everyone loves a backyard pool.
But I miss the old house. I miss the old neighborhood. I had such a magical childhood there, forming a rollerblading “gang” with my friends in the summers, riding our bikes to Shopko to buy $0.99 bottles of nail polish, swinging until it gets dark at Triangle Park (which is not the official name of the park but that’s always what we called it). My dad built a wooden treehouse in our backyard, but he’d correct us if we called it a treehouse; it was a “play structure” that extended into one of the taller trees in our backyard.
I feel high levels of nostalgia when I think about that neighborhood in the 1990s.
The place of many childhoods
About a year ago, my mom made a plan with the family who lives there now for us to stop by so we could take a tour of the house. They put on an addition where my old bedroom was, and upgraded just about everything else. The house itself looks only vaguely familiar, but the neighborhood feels the same.
“This house, on this quiet street. This house, in this neighborhood we love.”
Walking through the house, I kept thinking about how these exact walls and these exact floors and these exact doorknobs (glass doorknobs 😍) hold the memories of my childhood. It’s interesting to think that the kids who live there now will likely have similar feelings in a few decades about these same walls, these same doorknobs. The same is true for the families who lived there before us, back to the kids of the family who built the house back in the 1920s. My 1990s childhood nostalgia is eerily similar to someone else’s 1930s childhood nostalgia, or 1960s childhood nostalgia, or some future adult’s 2020s nostalgia. Same creaky floors. Same front door. Same epic doorbell (with real metal tubes!). Not only is this the case for all the kids who grew up in that house in Lincoln, my kids are developing a bond with our house in Des Moines, and it’s a bond that they share with people who have childhood nostalgia for the 1950s, 1980s, etc.
This House
Idyllic Beaverdale
I didn’t write this song about that house in Lincoln, I wrote it about this house in Des Moines. This house, where Matt and I live with our kids and our cat in 2025. This house, where we have lived our entire marriage. This house, where we brought each of our kids home from the hospital after they were born. This house, that has been our cat’s entire universe for most of his 16 years of life (ahem, it only took two weeks of marriage, one of which was a honeymoon vacation, before I couldn’t stand it any longer and we needed to fulfill my childhood dream and get a cat of my our own).
“These years with our growing kids, we shed tears for our aging pets. All the arguments and celebrations here, in this house. Our house.”
I did the math, and I realized that our house in Des Moines is about as much older than my kids as my childhood home in Lincoln was older than me. If that sentence didn’t compute, let me put it this way: I grew up in a house that was built about 60 years before I was born, and my kids are growing up in a house that was built about 60 years before they were born. I wonder if that’s part of what has always made our neighborhood feel so magical to me — it feels like the same age as my neighborhood did when I was a kid. I grew up in a house that had a built-in incinerator where people would burn their garbage (before it was outlawed), and my kids are growing up in a house that I swear is outfitted with a Cold War era bomb shelter (although no one will back me up on that).
Plus, Beaverdale is magical. It’s an amazing place to live. Forbes Magazine agreed, when they listed it as one of “America’s prettiest neighborhoods” in 2011. Beaverdale is walkable, has a high number of public parks per capita, and it has cute little pockets of forested areas (one of which, we own!) scattered amongst the residential streets. It’s the perfect backdrop for a childhood filled with play and exploration. Just like my friends and I created a rollerblading gang in the 1990s (we called ourself the “Street Strugglers”, ha!), our kids have created a forest club with their neighborhood friends — complete with a system of governance and elected officials!
The dream of the 2020s
When we bought our house, we talked about how it was either a really nice starter home or a kinda-small forever home. When we first bought it, people would ask us how long we imagined living here, and I found myself (prophetically) saying, “if we can’t make it work to live here with three kids, we’re doing something wrong”. It wasn’t particularly calculated that we’d have three kids, but here we are, living in this house, with our three kids. The older the kids get, the smaller the house feels… but I’m so glad we have stayed here all this time.
This Song
I’ve been in love with this house for 16 years, and that love needed to be written into a song, so that’s what I did this past January. I wrote it using a “rubber bridge” electric (I just threaded a rubber tennis racket shock absorber through the strings of my electric). The foundation of the song is built on two complementary lines on the electric (watch the video from the day I wrote it on YouTube or Instagram); in the studio, Bryan Vanderpool added drums and an interesting bass line and I added a bunch of keyboards (Wurlitzer and Rhodes), then I added some harmonies and acoustic guitars at home before sending it off to mastering.
This Song (Acoustic)
After I released the song, I posted an acoustic version of it on social media. Someone I don’t know DM’d me to tell me that they really liked the song, and that they liked the acoustic version better. So for this month’s digital download, I decided to make a quick acoustic recording of “This House”. This recording is available for my paid Substack subscribers. If you become a paid subscriber to my Substack, you will get digital downloads like this every month. Subscribe on Substack now.
