The Chapel Hill house I grew up in went on the market recently and was under contract in less than a week. The house (you can see pics here) was built in 1969, designed by my father Arthur Cogswell, a modernist architect who did many houses in Chapel Hill. He won an AIA award for this one, and I remember hearing something about that award leading to him being inducted into the AIA Fellows very early in his career.
My sister Amanda Kirk, who’s a realtor in the area, stopped by the open house and sent me some photos. The couple we sold it to in 2015 did some major renovations and altered the floor plan a bit, but still, those photos evoked a wave of nostalgia so strong I could almost smell my childhood.
The most unglamorous pool party ever
Originally the pool courtyard was enclosed by two long glass hallways, and I can still hear my mother’s quick steps up and back, between her room and the kitchen. I remember running up and down those hallways to get from one room to another, because I was pretty hyper and also because I preferred running to walking.
Although the house hosted its share of adult parties, we kids used it as a playground. The brick fireplace in the living room has a secret cavity beside the chimney that was a prime spot for hide and seek. Another excellent spot was the standing-room-only empty space behind an enormous canvas at the end of the living room.
That living room was the site of many childhood birthday parties and slumber parties. It was the scene of boy-girl parties with spin the bottle in junior high and slightly less innocent parties in high school. When I was in college, I brought about 20 people home from Atlanta for a Grateful Dead concert. But the most infamous party at Elliott Road was the annual pool cleaning party, devised by my father to take advantage of volunteer child labor, but enthusiastically attended by a huge number of our friends who thought it was fun to scoop out the old mucky water and algae. There are many long-time residents of Chapel Hill who did their share of mucky water scooping in that pool as kids.
Who hasn’t sat at that kitchen table?
The pool party was just once a year but the kitchen table at Elliott Road was a daily thing. Our mother would sit at that table chain smoking and sipping a cocktail while she entertained an endless stream of people stopping by. It might be neighbors, or old friends, or maybe other sociologists or anthropologists, often visiting from other countries. (Once a group of researchers she worked with in Kenya dropped by with a goat and roasted it beside the pool.)
My friends and Amanda’s were always welcome at that table, and many people who grew up in Chapel Hill at that time logged plenty of hours there. It was a place to tell stories, to laugh, to share problems and heartache. It was a guaranteed dose of second-hand smoke, but if you could handle that, you were not just wholeheartedly included but cherished and celebrated.
Gratitude for that time and place
Besides the many memories that came flooding back, those photos inspired gratitude for the gift of growing up in that time and place. Not just the house, but the neighborhood of Coker Hills and the town of Chapel Hill in the 1960s and 1970s.
The grownups around us were by and large involved in interesting work, mostly but not exclusively academia. They were highly opinionated and politically active and would engage in spirited discussions on a huge range of topics. They drank a lot and laughed a lot and mostly raised us with what my father called benign neglect.
That allowed us kids to roam freely. Most of us were free to go anywhere we could get by foot or bicycle. We would walk down to Eastgate for a milkshake at the Grants counter or to spend our allowance at Woods dime store or, even better, Billy Arthur‘s wonderland of a craft and hobby store. We’d push our bikes up Strowd Hill on Franklin Street to get uptown, hang around for a few hours, and then coast downhill all the way home to Elliott Road. I think the Kessings or some family in the neighborhood had an actual dinner bell outside, but most of us just headed home when the streetlights came on.
The people who knew you when
Atlanta is my home now. I’ve lived here, for the most part, since 1979. And I have many long friendships here, going back years or even decades. But there’s something about the people you grew up with that offers a different sort of connection. Maybe it’s that we knew each other before we were fully formed, when we were still awkward and weird and trying to figure out who we were. Or it might be just spending our childhoods in the same place, experiencing the 1960s and 1970s from that specific spot on the globe.
I have two friends here in Atlanta who also grew up in Chapel Hill. We weren’t best friends or anything, but we had many friends in common. We try to get together every month for dinner, which means we really get together about once a quarter, if we’re lucky. There’s something about being with the two of them that offers an instant and deep connection. Every time we’re together, I feel that connection click in. And I often feel the same thing when I run into old friends when I’m back in Chapel Hill.
Maybe you can’t go home again, but you can appreciate the people who were part of the time and place you originally called home.
