By Author J. H. Irwin
Author’s Note
“This chapter marks the moment my childhood divided into two different lives: the one I lived in Toledo, and the one that began when we moved to the shores of Lake Erie. At the time I did not understand how much that change would shape the person I would eventually become.”
Chapter Two: The House of Unfinished Walls
A house that was never finished
When I think about my childhood, the first image that often comes to mind is a house that was never finished.
The walls were opened, the plumbing torn out, and wooden beams held up the second floor where proper walls should have been. For years we lived inside that half-renovated cottage on the shores of Lake Erie, a house suspended somewhere between what it had been and what it was supposed to become.
At the time it was simply the place we lived.
Only much later did I realize how closely that unfinished house resembled the boy growing up inside it.
Before that house, however, there was Toledo.
Before I was seven years old, the world was a Dutch Colonial home in Toledo, Ohio. To a child it felt enormous. Apple trees shaded the yard and rhubarb grew thick along the side of the house. There was a fenced yard where we played and an alley behind the property that felt like the far edge of the neighborhood.
It was the kind of place where people left their doors unlocked and everyone knew the names of the children who ran through their yards.
Across the street was a carryout store called Gallagher’s. To adults it was just another small neighborhood shop, but to us it was a destination. We would cross the street with pennies in our pockets and return with treasures: penny candy, candy cigarettes, little hypodermic needle shaped tubes filled with colored sugar dots, and other things that would never survive modern sensibilities.
Inside the house life moved with a rhythm that made the world feel dependable.
My brother and I shared a bedroom on the second floor where posters of Diana Ross and the Supremes hung on the walls. My sister’s room sat between ours and my parents, and hers held a feature that fascinated me as a child: a closet inside another closet. Inside that hidden space stood several mannequins my parents used for their store, silent figures waiting in the dark for their next purpose.
My parents owned an appliance store just down the street, close enough that we could walk there. Because of that business, our house always seemed to have things other families did not yet have. We had a dishwasher long before most homes did. Our television rose slowly out of a cabinet when you pushed a button, lifting itself like something magical before showing its black and white picture. We even had a machine that dispensed ice-cold milk.
To a young child, it felt like living slightly ahead of the future.
My parents were social in those years. They built out the basement so they could entertain friends. There was a pool table, a long bar across the back wall, and a television mounted in the corner. On weekends the basement filled with laughter, music, and cigarette smoke while my siblings and I watched quietly from the stairs above.
The world felt full.
I was the youngest of five children, the caboose of a family where the age gaps were wide enough that my two oldest sisters were already married and living their own lives by the time my memories began. My oldest sister became something closer to a second mother to me. She taught me the small lessons of life: manners, hygiene, and how to carry myself in the world.
I spent so much time at her home that her daughters felt more like siblings than nieces.
She passed away seventeen years ago at the age of sixty-three.
I still miss her.
In those early Toledo years I was simply a happy child. I had a circle of friends and the kind of neighborhood life that felt permanent at the time. One of my closest friends had a family cottage on Lake Erie just two houses away from ours, and our families spent summers there together.
It felt like the sort of friendship that would last forever.
Then we moved.
It would have been 1967 or perhaps early 1968. The exact year blurs now, but the feeling of that moment never has. I remember looking back at the Toledo house as we were leaving. The apple trees still stood in the yard and Gallagher’s sat across the street exactly where it had always been.
At seven years old you do not fully understand what is happening when a life changes.
You only feel that something familiar is being left behind.
To this day I do not know why my parents decided to leave Toledo. I only know that when we crossed into Allen’s Cove on the shores of Lake Erie in Michigan, the version of me who felt confident and well-liked seemed to stay behind in Ohio.
My siblings adjusted easily. My sister became popular almost immediately, the kind of girl who seemed to belong everywhere she went. My brother found his place just as quickly and settled into the new life without difficulty.
I did not.
Around that same time something else began quietly forming inside me. I found myself drawn to other boys in a way I could not explain. I did not know the word gay then, and even if I had heard it I would not have understood it. I only knew that something about me felt different.
Children sense difference long before they can name it.
The teasing started quietly but quickly found its mark.
“Sissy.”
I was not effeminate, but the word worked like a blade all the same. Because of the thoughts already forming silently inside me, it cut deeper than the boys who said it could have known.
Later the insults would grow harsher. But the first wound opened there.
I began withdrawing into myself. While other kids played together, I spent hours walking alone along the beaches of the lake. In those years the shoreline stretched wide and open before rising lake levels eventually erased much of it.
The lake became my refuge.
I wandered the sand collecting whatever the water left behind. Bleached fish bones, arrowheads, the occasional antique coin, and jagged rocks became pieces of imaginary machines. In my mind they were spaceships, vehicles, and inventions that existed nowhere but in the worlds I built inside my head.
Looking back now, I think this was the beginning of my creativity.
When you spend enough time alone, imagination becomes a form of survival.
Life inside the house became confusing in ways I could not yet articulate. My parents had money, quite a lot for that time, yet the house we lived in told a completely different story. My father decided at one point to convert the cottage into a proper home. Walls were torn out, plumbing removed, and wooden beams installed to support the second floor.
Then the work stopped.
For years we lived inside what felt like a construction project abandoned halfway through. We had no working bathtub or shower, so we bathed in the bathroom sink. The old shower stall became a storage room. The house itself was cluttered and chaotic, filled with stacks of papers and unfinished projects.
I was deeply embarrassed by it. The few friends I had were never invited over because I could not bear the thought of them seeing how we lived.
What made it even more confusing was that my parents clearly had the means to live differently. They owned businesses, rental properties, and later a vending machine company. My brother and I spent our summers working on those apartments or traveling the summer fair circuit servicing vending machines.
One summer I tore down an entire brick building with a sledgehammer.
My hands bled.
My clothes were filthy.
And we drove home each evening in an old rusted Dodge van that looked like it belonged in a junkyard.
Yet every year we climbed into our motorhome, hitched a boat behind it, and drove to Florida for a month. Florida was still wild and beautiful then, with coral reefs alive with color and campsites along the water.
Christmas mornings were equally strange. The tree would be buried beneath a mountain of gifts, and sometimes my parents would surprise all five siblings with savings bonds or envelopes containing thousands of dollars in cash.
We were wealthy people living in a wreck.
Years passed before I fully understood what those early years had done to me. At the time I only knew that I moved through the world slightly outside the circle everyone else seemed to stand comfortably within.
It was not until much later, as an adult, that I stumbled across something that helped explain part of it.
One afternoon I found the baby books my parents had kept for each of us. My older siblings books were filled with photographs, milestones, and the careful notes parents make when their children are young.
When I opened mine, I found almost nothing.
A couple entries. One or two photographs. Then blank pages.
By the time I arrived, my parents had already raised four children. They had built businesses, managed apartments, entertained friends, and lived through the exhausting years of diapers, school schedules, and childhood illnesses.
In many ways they were simply finished raising children.
Seeing those empty pages did not make me angry. Instead it created a strange kind of clarity. It explained something I had felt for years but never fully understood.
The boy walking alone along the beaches of Lake Erie had been learning how to raise himself.
Even today the memory of that unfinished house stays with me. I cannot tolerate clutter. My home must be ready for guests at any moment, a quiet rebellion against the embarrassment of those years.
Somehow, despite the insecurity those early experiences created, I built a life that works. I learned to speak confidently. I learned to move through rooms that once terrified me.
But somewhere beneath the surface, the boy from Allen’s Cove still exists.
He is the one who walked the shoreline alone, turning fish bones into spaceships and silence into imagination.
And sometimes I imagine him still standing inside that house of unfinished walls, looking around at the beams and empty spaces, wondering what the rest of the structure will eventually become.