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My First Home

Home’s history revealed with initial find

Jonathan Barton for The Boston Globe

“FM”

Since the day my wife, Dawn, and I bought our house in Worcester, we wondered about the initials left in the concrete steps out front. The letters just didn’t make sense; we had bought the house from people whose last name started with a “B.” Stumped, we learned to overlook those initials; they were just part of the landscape of our first home.

It took four years, but we recently learned that those letters mean a lot to Judith Grynsel, whom my wife met while the two were volunteering at the local theater. They were carved by the man who built this house: Judith’s grandfather, Frank Masiello. He came to the United States from Italy with his wife, Argentina, and made a life here.

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Judith started crying seconds after she got out of her car. She pulled up in front, got out, opened her trunk, and started tearing up. Dawn gave her a hug. Judith thanked her for letting her come see our home. She’d heard all about this house. She knew more about it than we did even though she had never set foot inside.

Judith never really knew her grandfather; he died when she was 5. Judith wanted to see the house where her father and his 11 siblings slept (sometimes three to a bed) in the small upstairs until they got married. She wanted to see where her father proposed to her mother and where they, and all of her aunts and uncles, were married: our backyard.

Homes are built on memories.

My parents still talk about their first home and the ones they grew up in. I remember what my childhood home looked like and how it’s changed. When my wife visited me once at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she insisted that we go to the house in Deerfield she lived in for a few years as a small child. She and her sisters reminisce every time they meet about the neighborhood where they grew up in Mendon.

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Homes are more than places for people to live in and put their belongings. They’re living,

Koczwara Family

breathing things filled with history and emotions.

After Judith regained her composure, she met our neighbor, Peter Senna. He knew her family — he knows everyone — and grew up in this neighborhood before buying his own home here. They talked about Judith’s aunts and uncles before we retreated into our house to have lunch and look at old pictures, but Judith got a tour first. She immediately broke down upon entering our home. This was the place her father was born, in 1911. This is where he lived while working at the shoe factory in Webster with his brothers. We spent three hours looking over photographs of her family and our home. So much has changed around the house, but it’s still standing pretty much as it did more than 100 years ago.

Since my wife and I moved into this house, we’ve tried to make it our own. We’ve done plenty of updates, but mostly we’ve tried to bring our backyard to life. We live on the outskirts of the city (Judith’s mother would not visit her husband’s family homestead because it was in the boonies and she was a city girl) and decided to put the land to good use. We planted a garden and built a grape arbor. We started canning our own vegetables, like Judith’s grandmother once did.

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At one point during the tour, we told Judith we were thinking about replacing the front door — it’s weathered — and she asked if she could have it. We told her yes. It looks like the one in the pictures, and it’s a beautiful thought to think one day Judith will have the same front door on her house that her grandparents did.


Kevin Koczwara, a writer, lives in Worcester. Send comments to Address@globe.com. E-mail your 600-word essay on your first home to Address@globe.com. Please note: We do not respond to submissions we will not pursue.