How strange it seemed when during the Christmas break of 2023 that I should suddenly have so vividly remembered something that has never left my mind.
As I do practically every day, my eyes wandered to the picture of the old house where I spent most of my growing up years. It was the original home of the Burl Warwick family, located on Old Luttrell Road, near the intersection with Highway 61. My family rented the house from Jack Warwick, and we moved there just as I entered first grade.
Believe if you will, but I remember the first day we went to look at the house before Dad rented it. It was still furnished with Mr. Warwick’s furniture, though Jack took the furniture to his house and set up a “man cave” for himself in his basement.
I remember feeling something comforting about the house, and that never changed the entire time we lived there. That feeling was reinforced over the years by television. In imagination, that wonderful old house transformed to whatever childhood playacting role I undertook. Throughout the years that old house was a church, jail, grocery store, office building, school, but always a comforting place of refuge to me. The television show The Waltons made me feel even more as if that old house was a mansion, as the farmhouse concept was reflected in the construction of both houses, and I was just as happy at the Warwick house as the Waltons were on their mountain.
As I grew up in that house, my father’s health gradually deteriorated. He passed away when I was sixteen. Mother and I continued to live there for a time.
I remember 1983 particularly well. I graduated from Horace Maynard High School that spring. I got to enjoy a long, lazy, restless summer vacation in the house until I entered Lincoln Memorial University as a freshman in September. The last day of finals for fall quarter was the day before Thanksgiving, and winter quarter didn’t begin until January. I had the longest Christmas break of my life, from Thanksgiving Day until a few days past New Year’s Day of 1984. Forty years, four decades, ago.
People have recently been complaining on Facebook about how cold it is right now. Occasionally I wonder about things—including what was the best/worst day of my life. One thing I have never had to contemplate is what was the coldest I have ever been.
Much as I loved that wonderful house, it had shortcomings, including no indoor bathroom, no modern heating system, and no insulation. A Google search will relate that December 1983 was the coldest December ever recorded across the nation. In 1982, the high on Christmas Day was 76 degrees—the low temperature on Christmas Day 1983 was six degrees below zero. I don’t know exactly what the low was for Christmas Eve 1983. I do remember that Mother and I slept in a roll-away bed in the living room right next to the Warm Morning coal stove. We slept in our clothes under several quilts. An electric space heater was plugged in at our feet. Though the stove was practically red hot, the room was no warmer than if a single candle were the sole source of heat.
Some of our relatives from Knoxville came to visit on Christmas Day. They practically begged us to go home with them, fearing that we would literally freeze to death that Christmas night. We declined, choosing to stay at home.
I’m so glad we stayed at home. Little did we know that was to be the last Christmas we would live in that house.
I came home from LMU on a weekend during spring quarter 1984. Mother told me the sad news that we were being evicted for reasons that would be fodder for another article, can I ever bring myself to write it.
Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise. Though we had no place to go at the moment of eviction, friends helped us find a house to rent not ten miles away. For the first time in either of our lives, Mother and I lived in a house with an indoor bathroom! We lived in that house until we moved in 1991 to the house I currently own.
How good is God! In the short space of seven years, almost to the day, Mother and I went from being evicted tenants to property owners!
Nevertheless, the day in May 1984 that Mother and I moved from the old Warwick house remains one of the saddest, most traumatic days of my life. In leaving that house, lost to me forever was a dear friend that can never be replaced. When my hand closed the door of the Warwick house for the last time, I knew an era of my life had ended that could never be replaced. That move represented many things. The cold reality had arrived that change, especially undesired change, is inevitable. The fantasies of childhood were left forever for the uncertainties of an unknown, sometimes scary, future in a not always kind adult world.
The old house met a sad end. It burned on August 21, 1997, taking with it the lives of four children. How sad it is that those four children met such a tragic end to their young lives in the very house that nurtured and sheltered me so well. My grief for the loss of that old house haunts me every time I drive by the spot where it sat.
I’m sure the Warwick family experienced many joys throughout the years they lived in the old house, more than I could possibly ever know. The thirteen years I lived there can’t hold a candle to the decades the Warwicks flourished there. I know some think it silly for a person to be so nostalgic over an old house that his family never owned, and that others lived in after he moved on.
Try not to be critical, Dear Reader. If you could only enter my head and stroll down Memory Lane with me, you’d understand all too well what I’m so inadequately trying to describe.
My wish for you, Dear Reader, is that your 2024 brings you happy memories that nothing will ever be able to erase from your mind. May you forty years from now in 2063 (when I’ll be 98) have warm memories of the past to keep you warm as you celebrate the New Year 2064. Just hopefully, maybe I can be part of those happy memories. What a gift that would be!