A Blessing to Four Generations

A huge part of this family's history is up for sale. I was asked to write a short history of the house, as recommended by the Realtor, who said buyers may want to get an understanding of the home's emotional ties. My brief, one-page history is below.

The Lake House:  a blessing to four generations

            Four generations of this family owe a great debt to M.P. “Pat” Witherington, a World War II Navy officer and then a CPA in Statesville, who selected a waterfront lot off Morrison Farm Road in 1964 before Lake Norman was filled. He stood at the edge of the unpaved and unnamed road and knew it was the perfect spot with one of the finest views of any place on the north end of the new lake. Pat, who grew up near waterways in eastern North Carolina, chose a lot at the end of a protected cove with a miles-long view of the lake. At first, his family of his wife, Harriett, and four children enjoyed the water and the view on weekend adventures involving tents, a picnic table and lots of relatives and friends. Pat and Harriett loved it so much, they decided to sell their home in Statesville and build a new home at the lake.

            The house was completed in 1967, and the family moved to the lake permanently. Each teenager had her own bedroom, and all the children grew up on the water, boating, swimming, water skiing and watching new homes appear as lake living grew more popular. Sometimes, Pat would get home from a long day at the office and immediately take a quick swim off the dock.

            In 1972, by-then-widowed Pat remarried, and he moved to his new bride’s home in Statesville. For the now mostly grown children, The Lake House, as it had come to be known, would always be home. Pat kept the Lake House as a gathering spot for his children, their spouses and their children and grandchildren. Second generation families spent their vacations and special weekends at The Lake House. Each new generation fell in love with the house and the water and the heritage and history the house represented.

            The extended family continued to gather at The Lake House over the decades for Thanksgiving, Christmas, graduation celebrations, weddings, childbirths and other special occasions. The original siblings, scattered by careers, would all gather at the lake with their children, which forced some crowded sleeping arrangements but resulted in immutable memories. The third-generation cousins would form a Cousins Club and conspire to play tricks on their parents or produce talent shows for them, and those precious moments would return two decades later, when the fourth-generation children formed the same group dynamics during vacations at The Lake House.

            Each generation has found solace at The Lake House. During times of discord or crisis, they could escape to the lake to sit on the porch and look out across the water. Whether the lake sparkled with sunlight or roiled with an approaching rainstorm inching its way toward the cove, the second-floor porch was the spot to see nature’s beauty and to feel all tensions and worries drain away. If the weather was too cold for porch sitting, the living room fireplace could provide nearly as effective emotional healing.

            When Pat died in 2010, he left The Lake House to his children, who cherished it as the greatest bequest they could ever receive, and they and their children and grandchildren continued to enjoy the lake. Sadly, the expense of maintaining the house and the distance from their primary homes made keeping the house indefinitely an impossible dream. The calming, relaxing, ideal spot will have to bless another family.

Youthful confidence, reconsidered

In an editorial writing class 40+ years ago, I wrote an ode to our generation, the best educated, most activist, most affluent generation in history. We were going to end war, change the world and live happily ever after. A classmate pointed out that it all had been said before. Self-congratulation and self-esteem were hallmarks of us baby-boomers.

Decades later, the wisdom of aging has convinced me of how little I knew as a 21-year-old and how much like every new generation our generation was. When you're 18 or 20, you think you know it all, have experienced it all, and are ready for whatever life might throw at you. From the perspective of a wrinkled face and diminishing acumen, you realize just how ephemeral, how insignificant the transcending issues of the day really were. All the great events that seemed earth-shaking at the time — Woodstock nation, the Oct. 15 Moratorium, the Equal Rights Amendment, women in men's dorms, the draft lottery, Nixon's War on Cancer — have all faded into the fog of hazy memories, their impact on the world no more than a trivia quiz answer.

Every generation of teenagers thinks they can do better than their parents and grandparents have done in solving the world's problems. If, as John Lennon said, "Life is what happens when you're busy doing other things," saving the world is what gets kicked down the priority list while you're busy providing for your family, raising children, planning for retirement and grieving inevitable losses of loved ones.

From the perspective of mature years, I see how short-sighted my confident, 21-year-old self was and how delusional my generation, the one with all the answers, was. Forty years later, the world is a better place, in many ways; in other ways, it is no better and perhaps worse than the world we decried. This world has a whole new set of problems — Islamic extremism, an exploding world population, climate change, environmental toxins, an epidemic of obesity, and so on. From the perspective of having been around the block a few times already, my not-as-confident generation can recognize these issues as important but not easily solvable. Our world will accommodate itself to most of these issues and will solve some of them.

But this world will continue. Few will ever hold the power or wield the determination to actually change much. The human struggle will continue, a Sisyphean labor that ends in the way every life always ends.

Family reunions cling to memories

Each year we gather, descendants of a couple married on the cusp of the 20th century. He had never known his grandfather, a Confederate infantryman killed in battle. A small woman of proud Scot-Irish descent, she would bear 10 children. He had been among the great migration in the emerging South of landless farmers who had surrendered to what they called "public work" in the cotton mills in the late-19th and early 20th century. His eldest daughter told me once that "Poppa always thought the grass was greener just over the hill," and he moved the family often in search of better soil before he surrendered to working for wages. Most of their children would follow that migration into the mills, where the work was hard and hazardous and conditions were harsh. Hard times made them harder workers appreciative of any job that came with a regular paycheck. For them, "smart" meant diligence and industriousness, not intellectual talent.

Their whole generation is gone now, and the annual telling of stories about mill village shenanigans and about their parents, which had been the entertainment at family reunions, has been silenced. Still, we gather, widely dispersed first cousins trying to kindle the spark of memory of those 10 siblings and their parents. We strain to reconnect juvenile relationships that are as foggy as a dream, to connect faces to decades-old memories. We recount the recent events of our lives — deaths, illnesses, weddings, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A few of the next generation — the great-grandchildren of my grandparents — and the next generation after that wander through the crowd like visitors to a foreign land, unfamiliar with the history, the language and the culture. With few exceptions, we will not see each other for another year when this gathering occurs again.

Still, we gather, stirring the embers of shared memory and genetics. For a few hours, the embers flicker to life, dance into flame and give off heat. We warm our cool and modern selves in that glow of century-old kindredness, a connection of blood and shared memory kept faintly aglow in the simple effort of an annual family reunion until that day comes when this generation, too, shall pass into memory.