This Old House

Writer Alanna Nash ponders whether she can leave her family’s piece of the South behind.

- Alanna Nash

I WANT TO TELL YOU A LOVE STORY. It’s about a husband and a wife, the wish they held for their daughter, and the home that they all loved as much as each other. ¶ My father, Allan, one of 10 children, started out life unimaginably poor on a hard scrabble piece of ground in West Tennessee. My mother’s beginnings were equally meager, growing up in the shadow of the Smokies in East Tennessee.

They met during World War II, when my father was building the bomb in Oak Ridge, and my mother, Emily Kay, was working in retail in Knoxville. She was exquisitely poised and beautiful. He was elegant and movie star handsome. Their attraction was instant.

During the war, my mother moved to Louisville, Kentucky, to represent the Revlon line at an exclusive women’s dress shop. My father, smitten, followed her there. They lived in separate rooming houses downtown. ¶ In 1947, they married, and shortly afterward, began looking for an apartment. On a Sunday drive, they meandered through Cherokee Park, laid out in 1891 by the father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted. At the “poor end of the street,” as my mother liked to say, they happened upon a stunning 5,000-square-foot Southern brick Colonial that had just been constructed.

The home’s architect, Edgar Archer, had designed and built a number of government and commercial buildings throughout the state. The Alta Vista Road property, his private residence, was his crowning achievement. He fashioned a stained glass fan over the door, installed copper gutters and downspouts, and filled the home with Italianate tile and chandeliers to please his wife, Marguerite, who hailed from the old country. As a final touch, he added a pink marble fireplace in the basement.

To my mother, the house represented everything she had ever aspired to in life, or ever would. It was the stuff of fantasy.