401 S. McKinney Street, Mexia, Texas

This old house still exists on Google Earth. It was built by my grandfather more than 80 years ago, and it's the house where I spent most of my growing up years. My parents continued to live there after their kids grew up and left, and my father died in the same bedroom where his own father died 50 years earlier.

The rooms in the place were huge compared to those in a modern house. The bedroom my brother and I slept in had twin beds end-to-end along one wall, with room between them. Our sister's room was smaller. It had a double bed on one side of the doorway between our rooms and an upright piano with its back to the wall on the other side of the door. The other rooms were much larger. There were 12-foot ceilings.

There was a basement, too. I didn't know of another house in my hometown with a basement, and I felt quite smug about having one. I couldn't stand up in it after I was a teenager, and it wasn't very big. But it was a basement.

That's just the physical stuff, and it doesn't really matter much. What matters more are the family dinners on holidays, the times we'd sit out in the back yard in the summer, doing homework at my desk (that bedroom I mentioned had two desks, a wardrobe, and a gun cabinet in it besides those twin beds, and it wasn't crowded), deciding who got to bathe first in the only bathroom, watching TV with the family in our parents' bedroom, coming home from school to eat lunch in the kitchen with the family, washing dishes in the little sink, hearing my mother sing "Let the Lower Lights be Burning" when she worked in the kitchen, lying in my bed and reading one SF magazine after another, the collection of baseball cards I kept under my bed in the wooden box my grandfather made me, sitting in my room listening to Al Helfer call The Game of the Day in the hot summertime with a little buzz fan blowing on me, my mother sprinkling water on the sheets at night to cool them during the terrible hot drought years of the '50s, my father whistling when he came home after work, my sister practicing her piano lessons ("Shrimp Boats," "The Little White Cloud that Cried"), my brother creating his own piano compositions (the immortal "Aye-yi-yonga"), my high school graduation gifts on the dining room table (and Judy's and my wedding gifts there some years later), some mighty good dogs, some crazy cats, and so many more things.

The house still exists on Google Earth but not on this one. My brother owned it, but it had been vacant for a while. Thursday night, someone got inside and set fires in every room. The house is a total loss. The only thing my brother could save was the cast-iron door knocker that had been nailed up beside the front door. Ah, it was a beautiful door, too, let me tell you. Maybe you can see it in the picture. And I think that's all I have to say about that.