I’ve always been a dreamer…
I remember every summer growing up I would look forward to where my grandma would take my brother and I on our annual road trip across North America. We saw so much, from the ginormous trees that made up the forests of the Pacific Northwest, to alligators in the swamps in Florida. We even went into Canada and down into Mexico.
My brother would crawl into the back, onto the bench seat that folded out into a bed and sleep, but not me. I would crank down the passenger side window of grandma’s big conversion van, the kind with the table in the middle and the chairs that could swivel around so you could eat or even play cards on it, and let the hot August air blow in as I stuck my arm out the window. My hand would climb and dive in the wind, as I would pretend to soar over the trees and power lines as they zip by, until it got too hot and they made me roll up the window. I would gaze out the window and make up stories in my head about the sights we came across.
I was so fascinated with the different kinds of homes we would see along the way and I imagined how different the lives of the people living in them must have been from my own. The old farm house off of the Interstate in the middle of nowhere western Kansas that sat like an island surrounded by trees in a sea of flat farmland with no one next to them for miles. The homes with the big wrap-around front porch in some small town in Southern Missouri, they always have some type of rocking chair or swing on them that looked like it hadn’t been painted in my lifetime. My favorite ones though were the ran-down houses, like the ones in abandoned mining towns scattered throughout the mountains in Colorado that looked like everyone just decided to leave one day and just left everything right where it was when the mine shut down.
Since I grew up in the suburbs, it was a mystery how people ended up in any of these places. I wondered why people would have stopped there, what about that place says “this is a good spot to live”; when did they leave and why? Most importantly, I would wonder what the kids who lived there do for fun?
Even as I got older and could drive myself, I would still roll down the window of my ‘79 Camaro and drive with my arm out the window. I fell in love with the romance of the architecture and design of the early homes in Kansas City. Such detail and care was used building them. Big, stately three story homes, now with smaller homes filled in between them. What would the people who built these houses think about how the neighborhoods look now?
Now that I get to look at the history of the homes that I once stared at from the window of that van all those years ago, I know that this is what I was meant to do. Every home has a history, and since I own and operate my own title company I have the privilege to be a part as our client’s pursuit of their own American Dream, and I get to be a part of their home’s history.
Thank you for being a part of my dream,
Brett
