Key Street

Today is a very sad day for me, I found out this morning that my grandparent's home of 41 years will be foreclosed on.  This is not shocking news just very sad news to me, not shocking because every since my grandfather died it has seemed to be a problem keeping this house and whats hard to believe is that it was paid in full when he died almost 27years ago.  You see in the 60's it was very hard for blacks to buy there own homes, but  my grandfather in 1969 bought his first home on Key street.  It was a one story 2 bedroom house with a 2 room basement, the house did'nt even have any closets they had to go and buy wardrobes for every room for there clothes.  It had a lot of land attached though, my grandfather who I called Daddy all my life, had the biggest vegetable garden in our small town. He even put a mobile home on the back of the land for his stepson after he came back from the Vietnam war for his new family.  We had a donkey and a horse, so growing up in this house was totally awesome, I have such great memories and some bad ones as well, but just being there made all my bad memories obsolete.  Once my grandfather got sick with cancer and stopped working at his job and in his garden, all the life went out of key street to me, he died in 1984 and left my grandmother pretty well off with all his life insurance policies, and his tools, trucks, and the house fully paid for.  Soon after he died My grandmother changed, she went from a preachers wife, (sorry I forgot to mention he was a minister), to a woman that carried more about being able to date again, and money; all the things my grandfather thought was pure evil.  She sold all his things, his truck, his tools, his sunday car( a cadillac) almost everything the man owned, was gone within a couple of years of his death.  The whole family thought she had lost her mind, but we never worried about the house because, whew, it was paid for, so we thought.  Well years later my grandmothers friend up the street allowed the city to come in and remodel her house, new everything, but in turn they had to sign the deed to the house over to the city for these repairs. Well, my grandmother decided to do this as well, it may not have been a bad idea but, she did not get a lawyer or do the paperwork involved to assure that if she died what would happen to the house.  Here we are now my granmother died in 2007 and you guessed it, nothing was set in stone for my uncle, my grandfathers one and only child ever, his daddy worked so hard to get this house and in a blink of an eye it is gone for a misely $2000.00, That is one, what is owed in back taxes and two ,the balance of $30,000.00 that the city says they owe for the repairs.  All of this for  a house that was already paid for in the first place.  This is indeed a sad day for me because there are those in the family that could save the home but won't and those of us that want to save the home and can't.  No matter what noone can foreclose on my memories of Key street and the memories of a young black man in the 60's, striving to make life a little better for his only son and his future grandchildren and great grands,  I can still see him in that garden on key street tilling the ground for his garden, and most of all watching him spread newspaper on the front porch of that house cutting up a watermelon from his garden for all of us in the neighbor hood to share.  I'll miss you Key Street Forever.