Cuckoo

 My childhood home was built in 1962. My family moved into it shortly after that. We were the first residents at 1715 Garland Lane. Other houses were still being built on this new cul de sac in northern Boulder. It was all a part of a growing suburban growth spurt brought on by the opening of a vast new IBM plant just east of the city. My dad didn't work for IBM, but we knew a bunch of them. 

So this house, where I grew up and spent my formative years still stands. It was where I took my first steps. It was where we grew a garden that produced primarily zucchini of extraordinary size. It was where the Cavens entertained the masses for four decades. 

When at last it was deemed necessary and appropriate for my mother to move to a townhouse more in line with her newly divorced lifestyle and economic reality, some tears were shed. My brothers and I had our memories there long after the toys and desks and comic books had been hauled out. There was that heat register in the basement under which my right big toe was caught and I lost that toenail, for example. Or the Blue Spruce tree my mother and I planted in the back yard that everyone else said was doomed to die as the scruffy sapling that we hauled down from the mountains. It stands today. 

At one point, when my son was old enough to tag along, I made a visit to the old homestead. By coincidence the new residents were friends of my mother in law, and they were happy to let me poke around briefly until it started making my son bored and anxious. The kitchen had been remodeled. The horrible carpet in the basement had been removed. The hole that I had shoddily repaired after kicking a hole in the drywall in a fit of adolescent pique had been smoothed over. 

But looking out the picture window you could still see the Blue Spruce, towering over the fence in the back yard. 

Somebody else lived there now. 

But that was still my tree. 

And my big toe longed for its missing nail. 

This was how I felt upon looking at the satellite photos of a residence that had been built at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Construction on that house began in 1792, nearly two centuries before my childhood home. After it had been burned down by a spiteful group of British soldiers in 1814, it was rebuilt. Over the next couple of centuries, additions were made, not the least of which was the bowling alley in the basement for Richard Nixon. Oh, and an entire new wing was added in part to hide the underground bunker placed there just in case something bad might happen. And the East Wing became office space for the First Lady and her staff. 

Yes, a lot of families have lived in the White House. But it took a real horrible person to simply bulldoze the history of the place. To make room for the Epstein Ballroom. 

Like the brood parasitism of the cuckoo bird, this brood is stealing our nest to raise their own awful eggs.