Our family is moving to a new house across town. We are taking many memories with us, including the time my granddad put a new roof on our playhouse.
The Sides family is moving. After 10 years on Uranus St. in south Fort Collins, we are packing up and heading to the east side of town to a place with a bit more (desperately needed) square footage.
We are excited about our new home. But we are also very grieved to leave Uranus. (Yes, we make lots of jokes about our address. It comes with the territory.) We love this house. We love this yard. We love our neighbors and our neighborhood and have invested much of our energy into this galaxy.
This is also the first place that all three of our kids could truly call home. Lindsey and I have never brought home kids from the hospital. Instead, our kids were brought home—to this house—by guardian ad litems and case managers. So much of our family’s adoption journey has been tied to this place.
And truthfully, I don’t know what to do with myself. There’s a lot that we are processing as we make the new house ready and start to pack 10 years of life into cardboard boxes. I’d like to write a longer post at some point about our home on Uranus and the concept of the “forever home” that gets talked about a lot in foster and adoption spheres. For the next couple weeks, though, I’m going to try to share some vignettes from our life on Uranus. Stories, I think, that bring in larger themes of grounded-ness and home with the particulars of our family’s process to becoming a family.
I never met my paternal grandfather. Joseph Edmund James died of polio before my dad was born. My grandmother, Sarrah, married Jake Sides shortly thereafter, and that’s how I became a Sides.
Granddad owned a construction company in Roswell, New Mexico. Built homes, mostly. He had an almost obsessive compulsion with measurements. “Measure twice, cut once” was not sufficient for Granddad. It was more like measure as many times as possible, cut maybe. He took the same approach with his words and affection. They were measured, exact. Used as seldom as possible. Could have been a temperament thing; could have been a coping mechanism from the trauma he experienced as a child with an alcoholic father.
My grandparents lived in Roswell for decades. Grandma knew everyone in that town going back to the 40s. They raised my dad and his three brothers there in that Pecos River valley. About 15 years ago they moved to northern Colorado to be closer to family. Granddad was retired by then, and he was sharp and active—and more talkative. Everyone in my dad’s family noticed the change. Maybe it was altitude? Whatever it was, the move did wonders for Granddad’s word count. He talked all the time.
When he wasn’t talking he was still using his hands. He did some updates on their new home, some projects for neighbors. Shortly after Lindsey and I moved into our house on Uranus in 2012, he built custom shelves in all the closets.
These fruitful sunset years were numbered. Signs of dementia began clouding the skyline, like warnings of a coming storm. Then a sudden downburst hit one day in June 2017. Granddad told Grandma he needed to get a couple things from Home Depot (I think he was installing a house fan in their ceiling), but after a few hours he had not come back. There was still no sign of him by that evening. My dad and his brothers helped Grandma contact the police. All we could do was wait and pray.
In the pre-dawn hours the following day, there was at last activity on his credit card. He had checked into a hotel in Fort Collins. What began as a quick trip to Home Depot turned into a day trip in the mountains. He ran out of gas on Cameron Pass (elevation: 10,249 feet and 100 miles from their house) and a truck driver rescued him. Granddad did not remember how to get home, so the driver helped him check into a hotel by the interstate. My dad took grandma to get him. The reunion was sobering and tearful. But that talkative, joyful side of Granddad was not gone yet. I talked to him on the phone that morning and asked how he was doing. He said, “Great! I got a good night’s sleep at the motel!”
That was the beginning of the decline. Granddad liked to walk, to wander, to see the world while he could still remember it.
Three years later, in December of 2020, in the middle of all that pandemic mess, while Grandma was in the hospital with COVID and a broken hip, we checked Granddad Jake into a memory care home in Greeley. He likes to walk the hallways, eating other residents’ desserts. Grandma is back home. She goes to see him every now and then. There is the faintest flicker or recognition when he’s with her.
Even before the Cameron Pass incident in 2017, our family noticed early hints of dementia. But he still had some skill left in him. He still remembered how to use his hands and he could talk others through a construction project. The last thing he ever built was the roof on the playhouse in our backyard.
It was June 2016. James had been with me and Lindsey for only a few months. And we had just said yes to a foster placement of siblings—two girls, about the same age as James. (I’ve written about them some here.) The girls had come over for a playdate before they moved in, and the younger of the two had gotten a big sliver in her toe from playing in the playhouse. Lindsey and I knew the playhouse wasn’t in the best of conditions, but we hadn’t felt a need to fix it up before James arrived. Now summer was here, and the girls would be living with us in about a week. We looked at the sliver in Witney’s toe, then at the playhouse. The roof was practically a saint it was so hole-y. The floorboards on the inside were more boards than floor. The paint was non-existent. It was time for a makeover.
So we called Granddad. He and my dad came over the weekend before the girls arrived. He told us what to do and what supplies to buy. He measured and swung hammers and hung flashing. Dad and I took care of the shingles under his guidance. By the end of the day, the playhouse had a glorious and functional new roof along with new flooring. Lindsey painted it the next day. It was ready to be inhabited and enjoyed; it was ready to help kids from hard places feel at home.
The playhouse was originally a small storage shed, but the previous owners converted it into a playhouse. It sits in the southwest corner of our yard, shaded by a maple on one side and a honey locust on the other. The flower bed ups its curb appeal. It’s a quaint little cottage.
It has been the heart, the anchor, of our yard. A symbol, even, of what it means to have a forever home. Because I was born a James. And I am a Sides by adoption. In those two sentences is a world of loss and grief and life and joy too vast to be measured. In his goodness, God gathers it all up in his arms and gives our hearts a place to rest. He even gave me a Granddad who could build a roof.
