Taking the funhouse tour

If my father's house could comment on its own appearance on the realtor's web site, it might ask, "Does this terazzo make me look fat?"

I don't know if the realtor used a distorting lens or did some creative photoshopping, but the online images reflect a funhouse view of my old Florida home. The text is bad enough, touting a "HUGE two-car garage" that barely had room for Dad's Buick Behemoth and a "pleasant screen enclosed porch" described as "great for entertaining." I do recall a time I entertained four of my closest friends on that porch after my ninth-grade class held a mock presidential debate in 1976. (I played the role of Gerald Ford and my dear friend played Jimmy Carter, who lost the election in our school if not in real life.) For years now, though, that "pleasant screen enclosed porch" has entertained only legions of lizards.

The photos, though! The house looks like it's been stretched, every room appearing about double actual size. Rooms look sparkling clean but lifeless, denuded of warmth and hospitality, partly because all the carpets have been removed to reveal the stark terazzo floors underneath. Nothing scrams of a desperate need for redecorating like terazzo. 

That dark paneling in my brothers' room! Who thought that was a great idea? And then I see those drapes that I sewed for their giant windows, and I'm not sure what amazes me more: the fact that I was able to sew serviceable and attractive drapes for my brothers' room as a 14-year-old kid or the fact that they're still hanging there doing their duty. They don't look bad in the photos but I'll bet they're ready to fall to pieces.

Further, of the more than 20 photos on the realtor's web site, not a single one shows the cracks in several walls caused by the slumping of one corner of the foundation, evidence of the need for the purchaser to invest a pile of money in repairs.

But that's not likely to happen. The best thing about that house has always been its location, in a quiet neighborhood half a block from one of the best high schools in Florida and a mile from great shopping and medical care. All through that neighborhood developers have been buying up old Granny houses, gutting them, and replacing them with McMansions, which will no doubt happen to Dad's house as soon as it sells.

Rumor has it that the host of a reality home-improvement television show is interested in Dad's house, and wouldn't it be great to see total strangers mocking my parents' aesthetic choices on national television? It would almost be worth it to see them take a sledge-hammer to that oven, something I've wanted to do for years. But at this point I can't even see it as my home anymore because everything that made it mine is gone while everything that remains has been squeezed through the realtor's image-making machine to create sparkling photos that feel entirely unfamiliar.

My old house is gone, its shell a collection of funhouse images, its warmth reduced to bare terazzo, but the memories? Still warm, colorful, and alive as long as my brothers and I remain above ground.