Environmental Biography

Same Place, Different Times, New Place

I have had very few addresses in my life, though I still feel like I have been many places because I love to travel. I also feel as if those few addresses where I've lived have been "new" places at different times in my life because of my experiences there, because of who was there with me and when. And each of those moments have travelled with me, wherever I have gone.

My childhood home is currently my adult home. 17 Larchmont Drive in the Town of East Fishkill, (city-and former hamlet-of Hopewell Junction) New York. I think if I move away from here in the future, which is my hope, this place will still always be home. I am not one of those so-called "Boomerang Kids" who moved back home after college with no job. My story is different. It was not quite what I had planned in my life, but here I am back in my house and I have loved it for how it has changed me, and for the opportunities it has given me to grow. That is what being in your place can do.

My home has been lived in only by my immediate family. This place was built by a German man and his brother in 1972 (nearly 2 years prior to my birth), and they did a pretty darn good job of it, as I have always felt safe here. My father, a handy and creative man in his own right, did alot of the finishing of the house, in particular the upstairs bedrooms. The house is a Cape with an attached two-car garage. It is white with green shutters and black trim, and has a brick face on the front loggia. It sits up on a hill and until recently was the 9th house on the right when you entered my U-shaped road from one side, and the 9th house up on the left when you entered from the other side. That was always convenient when it came to directions. (Someone built a house on an empty lot a few doors down nearly 2 years ago, so that ruined my cool 9th/9th thing!) We are Irish, and proud of it, so my father adorned our mailbox with a shamrock which currently could use a fresh paint job, but still marks the Leddy Residence well. The house has not changed much, though the shutters were once blue, once black, but other than that, the landscape and tree growth are the only major changes one can see from the street.

My house sits on a little more than an acre and the yard, both front and back, while maybe not perfect landscapes, are still pretty great. There is not a spot on my lawn that does not hold a memory for me, and not a place in my backyard that I have not traipsed around upon in my life.

I am a country girl at heart. I am used to having my space. I grew up having privacy, not just because I had my own room, but because my home was up on a hill and hugged by trees and brush on three sides. And while we were a family of four, we could each be in a different room or space and enjoy what we were doing independently from each other, yet still come together for those ceremonial things like in the kitchen for breakfast in the morning and dinner at night once my dad arrived home from the firehouse; and in the Family Room in front of the boob tube to watch everything together from Game Six of the World Series, to "Dallas" and "The Cosby Show." This place was flexible and provided me with many options. The basement was my main play zone, and is the footprint of the house, so it is pretty large. We had a family room with a TV and room to play games, and the kitchen was my homework place of choice. As I said, I had a bedroom all my own, though I primarily used it for sleeping, and the den was available the times my dad was not home. It was hard to get bored inside, but if I did, my home included that great yard, front and back, where I spent alot of my days as a child playing with friends, with my cat, with my brother, and also playing on my own as I climbed the hill behind the house into the woods wearing my dress, my rainboots and a toy rifle, ready to conquer the world. I spent countless hours swinging on my beloved tire swing, singing songs in my head, feeling as light as a feather, watching my dad rake and burn the leaves he had gathered up off the ground. Ahh...the smell of those leaves. They represent so much more to me than just the smell of autumn. I can still smell that smell in my mind, and I can still see myself floating around my backyard, leaves rustling with every move. Back then, outside was as important a place as inside, so the outside is a big part of my place.

It was the perfect existence, the perfect place, and it was the only place I knew. It was nice and roomy, and awesome for parties and entertaining both young and old. I couldn't process in my head how my mom lived on that one floor in her Richmond Hill house growing up, and how my father, one of eleven children, shared the 2 bedrooms with them and did not really have a yard to play in, just the streets of South Ozone Park. Even my brother was born in the city and used to smaller spaces growing up. My house must have seemed like a castle to him, as it was to me!

Inside, when I was growing up, the house, for the most part, was my mom's turf. She was a stay-at-home mom and pretty much ran the place. I never felt like a guest in my own home, but she expected us to keep it in some order. When she cleaned the living room, we were not allowed to set foot into it for at least three days, so she could revel in the fact that it was truly clean for three days. We were not allowed to hang posters in our bedrooms or decorate them with the pop culture iconography of the moment like other kids. Instead, they were kept simple with family mementos, and things like sports trophies and science fair ribbons. Behind closed closet doors though, we had our stuff. She recognized our need for personalization or sense of self and encouraged it, but it had its place. The basement, or at least one side of it, was more or less my brother's and mine for the keeping (though it did had to have some order to it at the end of play time.) It was close enough to the kitchen, that she knew what we were up to, and big enough for us to have our "stuff" at hand. My dad tied bells to the basement door as what he called our "pseudo-burglar alarm," but really they were there so my mom knew whether we had left the house or not.

Mom kept things well and though we did not have alot, in fact my Living Room remained empty and without furniture for a large part of my life, she made the space homey. The pieces we had were few, but very good. She knew quality when she saw it, and would not settle for less. She was traditional in that way. She decorated for every holiday down to the placemats on our table, and the hangings in the front window. Mom had her fine china perfectly polished and displayed, though it still came out to be used for special occasions, and she had her share of collectables, but they were tasteful and not over done. She had just enough out, as she recognized that the more stuff out, the more she would have to clean. Her window cleaning was, and still is, an art and she proudly sports her cleaning clothes on weekends! My mom is the perfect combination of practical, stylish, and homey.

My father's zone was the garage and the other side of the basement. As all Leddy men do, he had his workbenches set up in both places filled with tools and anything you could imagine ever needing, and it was all labeled accordingly. He commandeered everything from old baby food jars and potato stick cans, to old metal lunch boxes to hold things like nails, casters, and sandpaper. The walls were hung with pegboard and strange little touches like a photo of my Nana, his own old ID badges, and my Papa's arm...yes, my Papa's mechanical arm which he used after he lost his own in WWI, hung on the wall in my garage and there it was for all to see. Somehow, it never was strange to me. He was a simple man and not at all formal, but he liked his stuff to be all around him. He had a bowl that sat on a lazy susan in the kitchen that he threw his "man pocket stuff" into, like loose change, his wallet, his glasses case, his collection of toothpicks and his college ring. That was more or less the only sign of him in those areas. He was more of a pack rat, and regaled the value of K-Mart and bargain stores. Nothing ever seemed to have an end life with him, as he could always find the use for something as opposed to letting it be thrown away. And all of this stuff filled shelves or hung out in the rafters of his zones in the house.

Nothing seemed abnormal to me growing up. Mom was the homemaker and made things look pretty and clean, and Dad worked alot, but when he was home, he mowed the lawn, fixed things, and stayed up watching "Taxi" or "Benny Hill" late at night or worked at his work bench on his latest project. Me...well, I followed the rules and cleaned up after myself, kept my bedroom proper, but lived in my house, loved my house, and was prideful of it when we had guests because our house made a great presentation. I was a designer even then.

I speak about the context of my house, my place, in terms of my mom and dad because they were my house and my house is me. In fact, based on what I have revealed thus far, my mom seemed to have the heavier mark on the place maybe than Dad, but this all changed when my father divorced my mother and moved out in 1993. When I left for my freshman year of college at FIT, he was living at home still. When I arrived back at the end of the school year, he was gone. While life during my parent's divorce saw alot of change in the physical house and in our lives, nothing quite prepared me for what I arrived home to. All of the sudden I saw my father's fingerprint on everything.

This was quite a transitional time for all of us in my house, in my place. Here I was, a self-professed New York City girl spending summers and breaks in a somewhat unfamiliar place that was once familiar. My brother was more or less a resident of another place (med school) altogether and now my father was gone. My mom was trying to pick up the pieces and try to make things better or normal again.

Suddenly, the workbench I hardly saw anymore when I walked into the basement everyday practically tripped me. The stairs that my father once chased me up after helping me get ready to take a bath after a long day of playing as a toddler almost forced me to want to skip them all together and find another way upstairs. The dark mouldings around the door jams and windows that he had personally stained and finished himself seemed darker than before. The den room that once housed his pleather recliner and TV was now empty but stained with his cigar smoke, and the upstairs bathroom lingered with his cologne.

Though, in fact, my father did not physically take alot of his things with him when he moved out, which did not help matters, it was more his "spirit" that at once helped make my home my place, now haunted it. While I yearned for my old place, I knew it was never going to be that again. Making this new place as beloved as my old place was going to take time. It was going to take healing. But maybe changing my place would foster the healing?

Many years passed, I graduated from FIT and I got a job but did not make enough money to live in New York and pay my school loans, so home I came.

There had been changes already. My mom bought furniture for that empty living room and had the kitchen re-wallpapered. Relief was starting to come and she was trying to make her own place, and make it a "home" again for the rest of us, but I came home different. Not only was this place still haunted by my father in my eyes, but moving back to it was failure to me. I was a NYC Girl, but here I was in "Hopeless Junction" on Larchmont Drive again and it was not because I was home on break from school! I had a job doing what I went to school for, but somehow, I was back at home. I was not living the dream in the place I saw fit. I was not where my friends were. So I looked at it as a layover place. I did not unpack a single box or suitcase. I put my college "papasan chair" and television in the empty den room that still housed my father's cigar smoke stains and convinced myself that I was a short term guest in my own home. I used the cardboard TV box as an end table and that iconic halogen dorm room torchere lamp for light, as I was only there in the evening anyway. I slept on my old twin bed in my old pink room and I stayed that way for 9 months. I was what my mom called "a bear" until one day when she told me that although this is not where I saw myself living, this was in fact where I was living, and it was still my home. She encouraged me to unpack one box and then another. She knew how, just like my father, my stuff was important to me, and by keeping it packed up, I was punishing myself. She knew that, just like her, I loved simple, but beautiful spaces and things. The pressure to be everything by 25 years of age was changing me, and I forgot what the power of home was, wherever it may be. It was the place that grounded you, the place of your history. The place that when you seem to know nothing, you know it. Whether it was for a day, a week, a year, or many years, unpacking and making my place my own again was going to make me happier.

And it did. It helped me, and it also helped her. Home became my place again, and we spent the next few years together taking it back from my dad, the ghost that still haunted it. No, it was not always easy. When old wallpaper came down, the "marks" my father made on the wall jarred me and brought me back to another time, reminding me that he built this house. Soon, these reminders became easier to find, less surprising and less of a setback. Those marks were where I came from and who I came from, and however estranged I am from my father now, those marks are indicative of a place I loved growing up in. Nothing changes that history or who I am today because of that history. Now I was making new marks in the place that I love again. With every door jamb I have painted white, with every old bush I replace with a new perennial, I am building my new place.

And my mom has loosened up as well. She is more patient of the dirt, she is more open to the new things, the new look, the new designs. This house was once hers and my father's biggest accomplishment after my brother and I, and now it is her own biggest accomplishment all her own as this old house has a new life which honors the old and welcomes the new.

In the years since, I have continued to help my mom redesign her place, and in the process it has become my place again. Living here still has allowed me to start my own design business when I had nothing in my pockets. It has allowed me to become a part of my community again and remind it of my name. It has brought my friends, old and new, into my place so that I can show them who I am and share it with them. It has given me the time with my mother that I might never have had. It has helped me to save money for a potential "new" place. That new place will always be in addition to this place though, because my home at 17 Larchmont Drive will always be with me, whether I am in it or not.

It has allowed me to flex my design muscles for the best clients ever and build something for myself from my own hands, just like my dad once did. To spend time and money on your place in addition to playing in it and entertaining in it is a very adult thing. I thought I grew up in this house all of those years ago, but I am still growing up here now. I could have never anticipated what this place I loved as a child would have become for me as a young adult and now as an older adult, but I look forward to living whatever it next has in store for me.