FORCLOSURE

I never thought it could be taken from us. Not really. Not something my dad built with his own hands. Not the place I learned, pour concrete, to tile a floor, and hang shingles. The place my siblings and I climbed through when it was nothing but studs and rafters. Where we played and grew.

My entire childhood was taken by a bank because the money was hand delivered on the due date, not post marked three days earlier. How? In what world is this okay?

In what world is it acceptable for a bank to change the rules not stated anywhere in writing? To arbitrarily decide your home, that you built, that protected your family was more valuable to them as an asset than the money literally in front of them, cash in hand.

I didn’t witness the loan officer telling my dad it was too late. The bank had decided to foreclose on his loan. I wasn’t there to see his heart break or witness the desperation and anguish crash across his face as his dream home was snatched away.

But my heart still breaks where I remember him telling me his grandchildren would no longer be able to come and build sandcastles for rock crabs on his beach. I feel the loss now as strongly as I felt it then.

Two of my four children have never set foot on the beach that shaped my life. And the older two hardly remember it. They have no memories of the home I grew up in that was supposed to be part of their life story. Maybe even passed down from generation to generation. They will never be able to sit on the deck my dad built from trees milled on our land and listen to loons sing on a windless fall morning. Or watch whales and sealions hunt in the sun warmed shallows of Holms harbor. They will never stand on the kitchen floor I helped tile while baking Christmas cookies with my mom.

More than a building was taken from my family during the housing crash of ’08. Our history and future was stolen. Christmases, birthdays, and lazy summers together in the house filled with memories, a place that is part of their DNA, gone. Because someone in some office across the country did the math and decided our home was worth more to them as a foreclosed asset than the loan already being paid off. A criminal action of theft. Of fenagling the rules to steal a home from a family to sell it as a house to someone new.

Even years later after winning a class action lawsuit we can’t get it back. I have dreams of being able to buy back my childhood home, the home I helped to build with my dad so I can share it with my kids.

But now my home is someone else’s house.