I was seven when I rode with my dad to a large Thai town to scope out a house for rent. It was 1981. At home in the village, Dad had described the prospects to us: “There’s two houses right next to each other. One is green and has this pond out front. Yeah, I guess you could use it as a swimming pool.  The house is pretty big. Some policemen live there right now. Then there’s a great big cream-colored one right next to that.”

Having lived in a stilted home with a grass-roofed porch, I couldn’t imagine what this new house was like.  We were to move into a modern Thai place, so unlike what we had in the village, yet not the same as an American home, either. My vote was for the green dwelling with the swimming pool out front. But my dad and I would be checking out the vanilla house.

What I remember from my first visit to the long, rambling residence was that it was full of people. A farang dad, American, who–I found out years later–had designed the place. A large, cool dining room with a dark wooden table, green-padded chairs, and smooth cement floor. A small boy running around with a plastic levered appendage, which he used to snatch at shining Christmas decorations that were still dangling from the ceiling in what must have been May or June. And books–stacks of small, hard-bound books each marked with a small ladybug and inscribed with “Ladybird.”

The family invited me to pick out some books. Pick as many as you want. I began to take them up on their offer, but my dad stopped me. “Just a few,” he cautioned.

Despite not having a pond in the front yard, the cream-colored house at the end of Soi Santisuk (the Side Road of Peace and Happiness) won out over the policemen’s mint green residence. For the next several years, until we left the country, we enjoyed its numerous amenities: electricity; two (2) big bathrooms; hot water for the shower in the master bathroom; air conditioning in the master bedroom; a long, red-tiled kitchen; shining parquet floors in three rooms, including the vast living room; a garage; a back patio; and a generous, fruit tree-lined yard to play in.

The previous owners had left behind a few pieces of unique furniture, like the dark wicker couches with zebra-striped cushions that actually complemented the enormous, non-symmetrical living room. (“You could play tennis in here!” said a missionary friend upon visiting the place for the first time.) They left us the aforementioned dining table that, along with our humbler wicker couch and chair and my mother’s sewing table, suited the large dining space well. My mom chose a nook between the living and dining rooms for her office and small desk for whatever child would be homeschooling (and that was me, at the time).

Behind one door down the hall was a storeroom crammed with barrels of the type that missionaries used to ship their worldly goods across oceans. It was so quiet and stuffy in that dim space that my ears rang. The door to the left at the end of the hallway opened to a bright bedroom shared by us four kids and furnished with shelves for toys and books, like the Fisher-Price wind-up teaching clock from the States that someone had sent for my younger sister. Two rooms could have fit comfortably in my parents’ bedroom across the hall. This parquet-floored room was outfitted with the previously mentioned air conditioning unit, a dresser against a far wall to the right, a bed reached after a long walk toward the windows, and a couple of end tables. My dad’s office, similarly spacious and well-appointed (flooring-wise, at least), was painted blue and offered a large guest bed in addition to Dad’s desks and translation equipment lining two walls.

Our family of six stretched to inhabit that whole house and most of the property it sat on. We ate our meals at a small, honey-colored table in the kitchen, competing and interrupting to tell stories until my preschool brother started developing a stammer under the pressure. We raced around on the patio in the sun, listened to my mom read the Narnia books aloud on the wicker couch before bed, and snuggled under blankets at night listening to the rain pounding the roof. On sultry evenings, we abandoned our own beds at all hours and were welcomed into a soft mattress on the floor of our parents’ cool bedroom.

I finished second grade at the desk in the alcove, copying spelling words from my mom’s crisp example displayed on the wall in front of me. My mom sent us out to play every afternoon (we didn’t have a choice in the matter) as she sewed our clothes in the dining room. The thorn-infested front yard was good for occasional games, the trees bordering the yard hosted playhouses, and we could be found surprisingly often on the sidewalk wrapping around the house. The only part of the property we didn’t visit was a quarter acre or so of grass and weeds off to one side that always made us think of snakes. Even then, I remember my older brother making a brave foray or two in there.

All these years later, strains of the pleasant pop standards my mom listened to while sewing (And Aubrey was her name . . .) can take us back to those days of swinging on the backyard playset my dad made for us, reading on the patio, fighting with siblings, playing with Thai friends on sunny afternoons. Perhaps peace and happiness on Earth are not fully attainable, but when we lived down that soi, we got as close to it as humanly possible.

This is the place! It’s looking a little abandoned. Is this before we moved in, or years after we first left?  (My parents and two younger siblings lived in there again for a year or so in the 90’s. We hear it’s been torn down, for what reason we’re not sure.)  By the way, it’s a good thing we didn’t opt for the green house with the swimming pool. But that’s a tale for another day.

There’s a story in nearly every part of this picture–the open shutters of our bedrooms, the closed storeroom, even the tile roof. I’ll save these for another time. There’s the door to the small office/classroom in the middle, and a yellow van that tells me that our German friends were visiting. I’m not sure who is standing next to the living room windows.

My dad’s note:
Hey Guys,
I located some old color prints while straightening things up in my office. In them, I found these two–our home in Nakhon Phanom on the lane of peace and happiness (Soi San Ti Suk)–which I’ve spliced together. Unfortunately, whoever took them had their finger over the right top corner of the lens in both photos, thus the dark shadow. I’ve brightened it up a bit so that the garage entrance is visible. Looks like it’s time to mow the weeds in front again. If you remember, there was no nice lawn around the house, just creeping thorns and wild grassy weeds. This photo really doesn’t do the place justice, but it’s better than nothing. The good photos were in the two trunks that got stolen after we arrived back in [U.S.] (1993-94).

The Soi