Moving the Von Riesen family’s old home

Moving the Von Riesen family’s old home is a childhood memory in which the house’s departure becomes both a visible loss and a sign of the pressure that helped bring it about. In late summer 1979, the family watched the bungalow leave First Street on the back of a truck; afterward, Jake Von Riesen could still see the empty place where it had stood, but could not recover the home he had built himself.

Background and Pressure

The wooden, brick-and-plaster bungalow was more than a property to Jake. He had built it with loving attention to its details when he and Lottie were barely twenty, newly married and full of energy. Its long covered porch let the family watch electrical storms while staying dry. The replacement house was similar, but it was not this house: it did not carry the same history of Jake’s work and young married life.

The sale followed pressure from the owner of the neighboring car dealership, who wanted the land to expand his parking lot. He exerted pressure until Jake could not take any more and sold the property for what Lottie regarded as far too little. The dealer later framed the transaction as ordinary business, but the family’s loss was anything but impersonal.

Jake’s reluctance to fight was intensified by East Village’s religious and commercial order. The community had begun as a Mennonite refuge from worldly vices, yet religion and business had become closely intertwined: accumulating wealth could be treated as evidence of divine blessing, while resisting a successful businessman risked seeming unchristian. Jake, a quiet and depressive man who valued reading, writing, and reason, felt persistently guilty and feared that standing up for his own home would be a sin. Lottie urged him to resist, and Elfrieda Von Riesen tried to organize a village petition against businesses expanding into people’s homes, but neither effort changed his decision.

The House Leaves First Street

The family stood in the middle of the street as the low bungalow moved down First Street, past the A&W and the Deluxe Bowling Lanes, and out onto Highway 12 until they lost sight of it. Elfrieda repeatedly insisted that she could still see it, holding onto the house in words as long as it remained visible; at last, she acknowledged that it was gone. Her refrain makes the removal unfold as a gradual disappearance rather than a single instant of departure.

Yolandi Von Riesen asked her father where the house was going. Jake shielded his eyes from the sun and said he did not know; the narration makes clear that he did not want to know. He stayed behind, looking at the empty space for what seemed to his daughter like an eternity. In the car, Elfrieda complained that the backs of her legs were burning on the hot plastic seat. Lottie eventually gave a slight honk—not enough to startle Jake, only enough to turn him toward the family. The small gesture ends the vigil without undoing what the family has watched happen.

Aftermath and Significance

After the family returned to town and moved into the new house, Jake could sit in his lawn chair in the front yard and see the vacant site through the trees across the highway. The absence remained part of the new home’s view. His response was not relief at having settled elsewhere: he had not wanted the house taken away, and he had not initiated the sale. Lottie became restless and dreamy, while Jake slammed things around in the garage, giving the family’s different reactions to the move distinct forms.

The removal exposes how private attachment can be overpowered without a dramatic confrontation. The car dealer’s goal was commercial expansion; Jake’s sense of Christian duty and his place in the community made resistance difficult, while Lottie’s ability to fight was constrained by the domestic hierarchy she remained loyal to. The truck carries the house out of sight, but the empty lot, visible from the new home, keeps the consequences of the sale in view.