1979

1979 is the year the Von Riesen family home was moved away. In one late-summer afternoon, the family watched the house travel down the street and out of sight, making the year a marker of both a concrete rupture in their domestic life and a memory that the narrator continues to revisit.

The Year and the House

The removal took place in 1979, late in the summer. The house was a low-slung bungalow of wood, brick, and plaster that Jake had built himself when he and Lottie were barely twenty, newly married and full of energy and hope. Its departure therefore carried the history of the family’s beginning along with the building itself.

That history included the young couple running through the sprinkler in their new front yard on hot evenings, heedless of older neighbors who disapproved of such public exuberance. Elfrieda later likened the scene to La Dolce Vita and the sprinkler to the Trevi Fountain. The remembered playfulness stands in contrast to the house’s departure years later, when the family could only watch it being taken away.

The Afternoon of the Move

Jake, Lottie, Elfrieda, and the narrator stood in the middle of the street as the house was carried down First Street, past the A&W and the Deluxe Bowling Lanes, and onto the number twelve highway. Elfrieda repeatedly said she could still see it, until the house had gone far enough that she admitted it was gone. Her repeated insistence gives the moment a small, measured duration: the house disappears not all at once, but as the family follows it with their eyes.

Asked where the house was going, Jake said he did not know, and the narrator understood that he did not want to know. After the others got into the car, he remained in the road looking at the empty space. Lottie eventually honked gently to draw his attention back to the family. The scene ends not with an explanation of the move but with that quiet gesture, as the year’s loss becomes visible in the absence where the house had stood.

Retrospective Significance

The narrator’s recollection makes 1979 more than a date attached to a change of address. The house’s passage from familiar landmarks toward the highway turns a private family history into something the family can no longer keep in place or fully follow. Elfrieda’s words falter as the building vanishes; Jake remains facing the emptiness; Lottie’s restrained horn calls him back. These distinct responses give the remembered afternoon its emotional shape without explaining away what the family lost.

The account also sets the family’s later recollection of youthful beginnings against the physical departure of the home Jake built. The house is gone from sight, but the narrator can still see the scene. In that contrast, 1979 marks a break in the family’s surroundings and the beginning of a durable act of remembering.