I.

My parents raised me in a white-sided saltbox house, the sort children draw in crayon. Years before we lived there, it had been cut in half and moved across town. We never learned why. 

II. 

In the days of candles and outhouses, Americans lifted and moved countless houses. To raze an old house and build a new one proved more costly and difficult than laying it on logs and pulling it through unpaved streets by horse or oxen. A 1799 engraving by William Birch and Son reveals a team of horses pulling a saltbox structure attached to wooden wheels through Philadelphia’s Walnut Street. Since then, Americans have moved lighthouses, churches, hotels, theaters, even an airport terminal. 

Today Americans move fewer houses. Breaking off and hauling walls and roofs to a landfill is easier, and often cheaper, than recycling a house. Even simpler: demolition. YouTube is full of instructional videos: “How to demolish a house in 20 minutes! [Part I],” “How to Demolish a House in 3 Minutes,” “How To Demolish a House With Case Excavator,” and “Rednecks Blow Up House With Cannon.”

“I wish the city would buy and demolish it,” my mom tells me of her home in Ohio, the house where I was raised. “The land is worth more than these walls.” 

The living room wall is cracked, as is the wall of my childhood bedroom above it, indicating where movers had cut the house in half. We never could hang a picture straight because the movers left the house uneven. That’s why as a child, when I drew landscapes, I started with a crooked horizon. My parents corrected our wobbling tables and chairs by slipping coasters and blocks of wood underneath one side of our furniture. Friends called the house “tiny,” but in my mind it rivaled the castles in my children’s books—back when my dad was still alive.

Our garage was his magician’s hat. My mom helped him carry out new, amazing objects: bookshelves taller than them, rose arches, birdhouses with as many as eight different entrances, dollhouses shaped like our house. Too enormous to fit through our back door, my favorite dollhouse required him to remove the door from its hinges. In the summer months, the dollhouse stayed outside. One day he mounted it on wheels. 

“A mobile home,” he called it.

The roof, made of real asphalt like ours, lifted off to reveal an attic. He screened the windows and added shutters. He wallpapered each room. He used free samples of linoleum and carpet from a local flooring store; the saleswoman assumed we were redecorating our house. He even made a staircase and cut a hole in the second floor.

“I don’t want to make your dolls have to fly from floor to floor,” he said.

In the days after his death, I knelt in front of the dollhouse—then stored in our garage—and talked to it, as if he’d transformed into it. I was eighteen and home from college, a school just outside Chicago. He was eighty and had died on a borrowed bed from hospice, next to the crack in the living room wall. 

“When I die,” my mom said after his funeral, “do what you want with this place.”

A few days later, I boarded a train and left “this place” for Chicago. 

III.

In the nineteenth-century, Chicago transformed house moving into an industry. 

But first, the Indians would be forced to move their homes. 

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