I knew the day was coming, but that didn't make it any easier. As my sister and I sat in the offices of a title company across the street from the Clark County Courthouse at Arkadelphia, I looked through the papers showing that my parents had purchased the house in the Ouachita Hills neighborhood in the spring of 1961. I was not yet 2 years old.
What's now Ouachita Baptist University began developing the wooded hills near the Ouachita River in the late 1950s for faculty housing. Most of the houses were occupied by faculty members, coaches and administrators. My father and mother were Ouachita graduates, but didn't work at the school. They ran a business downtown.
I didn't realize it as a child, of course, but I was living in a special place. My neighbors included a noted musician, a talented playwright, a famous basketball coach, a philosopher, a writer, a theologian and even the state's lieutenant governor. It was the kind of neighborhood that could only be found in a college town.
It was just a short walk to the Ouachita River and Mill Creek, where I could wade, throw rocks, and fish. There was a pond across the street to fish in and an old barn to hide in. Ouachita had cattle and horses in the pasture across the street from our house in those days. So even though we were inside the city limits, it was like living in the country.
In the winter, the abundant hills provided the perfect venue for sledding when there was the occasional south Arkansas snow. In the spring, floods provided opportunities to look for turtles and snakes in places we might not otherwise find them. In the summer, the Little League baseball field was an easy bicycle ride away. In the fall, the huge pecan trees along the river provided the nuts we would use at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The practice field for my beloved Ouachita Tiger football team was just down the street, giving me a place to hang out after school as a water boy until I had my own football practices to attend once I became a teenager.
It's human nature to look back on things with rose-colored glasses, but there really was a Mayberry element to that neighborhood. Most of us even attended the same church, the First Baptist Church of Arkadelphia. I lived in a dorm when I was a student at OBU, but I could come home each afternoon to check my mail, deliver dirty laundry and wind down for a few minutes before returning to my job as sports editor of the local newspaper. As my father's dementia and other ailments took hold, we were forced to move my parents to a facility in Little Rock. Even though neither of us lived in Arkadelphia, my sister and I hung onto the house.
We left the water and electricity on, and I occasionally would spend nights there after broadcasting Ouachita football games on the radio. I held out the hope that I could renovate the house as a weekend writing retreat. Finally, my wife convinced me how impractical that plan would be. Last spring, my sister retired following a career in public education and began what turned out to be a new full-time job, cleaning out the house. I'm not sure I would have been able to do it. I would have wanted to read every old newspaper clipping and save those things that really aren't worth saving.
I was at home in Little Rock on the Sunday morning prior to the real estate closing with the television tuned to one of the few programs I watch, CBS Sunday Morning. Steve Hartman, the network's modern-day Charles Kuralt, had a piece about moving his father out of a house in Toledo, Ohio, that had been in the family since the 1950s. I don't remember his exact words, but his ending went something like this: "A house with no one in it is no longer a home. It's just a house. What endures are the memories and the lives that were touched by those who once lived there."
I departed Little Rock early on a Monday morning for the trip to Arkadelphia. As I made the one-hour drive, I thought of Steve Hartman's words. I thought of my father, who has been gone for four years now. I thought of my mother, who will turn 90 in August. I thought of my older brother. He got to grow up in that house for less than three years before leaving this earth in 1964 when he was 9 and I was 4. I met my sister for breakfast at the Cracker Barrel in Caddo Valley. We sipped our coffee after the meal and didn't say much. Neither of us looked forward to the closing. We signed the papers shortly after 8:30 a.m.
My sister stayed to visit with the real estate agent, and I made one last trip to the house. I walked through the kitchen where I ate most of my meals, the den where I spent so many nights in front of the fireplace watching sports events on television, the living room where we would open gifts on Christmas morning. I walked for the final time into the recreation room my father had added to the house, the one that had the pool table and hosted hundreds of OBU students and others through the years. I walked into my parents' bedroom, my sister's bedroom and finally the bedroom I had shared with my brother. Then, I took the key off the chain, laid it on the kitchen counter, took a long look and shut the door before the memories could totally consume me.
I stepped into the carport where my dad once had parked his big Oldsmobile, started my car, drove slowly around the circle and then headed for U.S. 67, Interstate 30 and the office in downtown Little Rock. The tears didn't clear until somewhere east of Malvern.
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the director of corporate communications for Simmons First National Corp. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 07/29/2015