The Memory House

    It had been at least 10 years since my daughter Maria had been to her grandparents' house in Richmond Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. 
    And so she greatly desired while in from Los Angeles to take her children to visit her 96-year-old grandfather, Tom's dad,

Charlie Liszkay,

...and to let them see the house built in 1957 where he still lives, where their Grandpa Tom grew up, and of which she, Maria, has so many childhood memories.

Tom's family's house.

       Maria found the house much as she'd always remembered it, in fact little changed inside since she was a child,

...still full of interesting and old-fashioned things, some brought over from Hungary by  relatives of Tom's mother, Mary Biro Liszkay,  who came to America as a teenager from a small Hungarian village near the Russian border.

    Other pieces belonged to Tom's father's father, who came to this country from a part of Hungary that became part of the former Czechoslovakia.

        But most of the things still left in this house are things that have always been here, and this house recalls a time when things were kept for life  then passed on to the next generation and, rather than being replaced with age, became more loved.

    My niece Audrey, sister of my local nephew Randy,

...but still geographically one of the "Cleveland Cousins",  also came  to visit  Grandpa and introduce her daughter Avery to the "Los Angeles Cousins".

    The girls played with some of the toys from the old toy box upstairs that still held the same toys Maria and Audrey used to play with during visits to their grandparents; the same toys in fact that had belonged to their parents, Tom, his brothers Steve and Donald, and his sister Mary Jane, when they were young.

    Makaila played with her great-Aunt Mary Jane's Barbies.

...And Sienna napped in a bed that once belonged to her great-great grandfather.

    But Maria also wanted her daughters to have the experience of playing in their great-grandparents' vast yard,

...and walking to the beautiful creek at the back of her grandfather's property where she, her siblings, and cousins used to play, as did her father, aunt, uncles and their cousins before her.

   

    Maria wanted to bring home some small meaningful memento from her grandparents' house and her Aunt Mary Jane offered her the Barbies, which she accepted.

    Some houses, like some people, live to hold more memories than others.