Eleven months before that Sunday, I bought a foreclosed 1962 brick ranch on Alder Court from the bank that had taken it back. The porch roof had collapsed, the kitchen hadn’t been touched since Eisenhower, and there was a concrete pool out back that the last owners had left full of leaves and green water.
The price was $189,000. I put down $38,000, my half of the money from selling the house my ex-wife and I had shared, and took a thirty-year mortgage for the rest. I signed the closing papers at a title company on East State Street on a gray Tuesday in June. The deed was recorded with the Winnebago County Recorder that afternoon.
That evening I drove a survey stake into the northwest corner of the lot, wrapped in orange flagging tape. I wrote NW COR on the side in pencil. Surveyors do that. It’s not sentimental. It’s habit.
Okay. It was sentimental.
My marriage had ended four months earlier. Renata and I had been together eleven years. She left on a Thursday, carefully, with two suitcases and a lawyer’s phone number. I’m not going to tell you what went wrong, because I don’t entirely know. I only know I spent that winter in an apartment with a mattress on the floor and a microwave, and the day I got the keys to that broken house, I felt for the first time in months like someone who owned something.
I put another $34,000 into it. A new roof was $11,800. New plumbing was $6,400. Rewiring was $5,200. Then came the tile, the flooring, and a kitchen I designed on graph paper during my lunch breaks. I paid for most of it out of savings and covered the rest with a $12,000 home improvement loan from my credit union.
I did most of the work myself, at night, after ten-hour days on job sites. I laid tile at midnight with a work light clamped to a stepladder. I learned what a P-trap was. I learned what it feels like to cry over a faucet that won’t stop dripping.
The house wasn’t impressive when I bought it. It was broken.
So was I. By the time the last cabinet went up, we were both a little better.
My family is a different story.
My father, Cecil Voss, is sixty-eight, a retired high school football coach with a barrel chest and a voice built for sidelines. He has opinions about everything and a talent for delivering them loudly, in front of witnesses. My mother, Joyce, is sixty-six, a retired school cafeteria manager who has spent forty years agreeing with him quietly and half a second late.
My sister, Naomi, is forty-one. She’s a real estate agent with a bright, glossy smile and a habit of speaking in commands.
Naomi organizes. That’s how she puts it. Birthdays, reunions, memorials, baby showers. She does it the way a general plans a campaign, with a spreadsheet and no questions. Her usual venue is whoever has the biggest yard. Nobody ever agrees to host. They just find out.
I had a pool. That was my mistake.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.