WHILE OUR LAST house, the only one we ever owned, was being built, we lived for six months across the road from it in my grandfather’s house, the whole family sleeping in the room that my grandparents used to sleep in but that my grandfather abandoned for another, smaller one after my grandmother died. For six months, the seven of us, my parents, four teenage boys and my seven-year-old sister, slept and, for the most part, lived in that one room, the door of which was always closed. The rest of the house, except the kitchen and the bathroom, was practically off limits to us, even the living room, for we had to go to our bedroom when my grandfather retired to his at eight o’clock. The precious interval between dinner and bedtime we spent in a manner we were not accustomed to — saying the rosary, on our knees in the kitchen, leaning, beads in hand, on chairs or on the daybed.

It was deemed to be such an imposition on my grandfather, of whom everyone was terrified, to have the seven of us in his house, that my mother warned us not to make a peep once he went to his room. My parents slept in what must have been the bed my mother was conceived in, it looked so old, and the five of us children slept on the floor, between the foot of the bed and the wall, on our sides, for there was not enough room to sleep on our backs or on our stomachs. We undressed for bed in shifts, my parents first while we waited outside in the hall. Once they were under the covers they called my sister in, and when she was in her sleeping bag and facing the wall, we boys went in.

It seemed the house across the road would never be built. Our bedroom window faced it, and we spent a lot of time watching its progress from there. An old house on the site had to be torn down to make way for ours. It was one of the oldest houses in the Goulds, a white saltbox with a dark green trim. After it was levelled by a bulldozer, people were permitted to scavenge for firewood, and there was not much of it left to be hauled away when they were finished.

We moved into my grandfather’s house in mid-October. The shell of our house, a small bungalow, was built very quickly, raising our hopes that the whole thing might be finished before spring. But work inside proceeded very slowly. Once the shell was up to protect them from the coming snow and hide them from the eyes of their employers across the road, the carpenters took their time. The winter was a bad one. One morning we woke up to see a snowdrift arced across what soon would be our front yard, cresting at about fifteen feet right where the driveway would be.

As soon as there was a floor solid enough to hold us, we went over there to walk around, not minding the dark. We were so glad to be on our own again, even if it was only for as long as we could stand the cold. I thought the place would always have the new-house smells of unfinished wood, gyproc, sawdust and cement. By the light of the flashlights we carried, we could see each other’s breath. Though there were only joists to mark the rooms, we staked out our territory, the four of us boys sitting in what would be our room, staring enviously through the wooden uprights at my sister in her room; beyond hers was my parents’ room, another set of uprights away, my father sitting on a sawhorse, smoking a cigarette, my mother with arms folded, staring out the window at her father’s house across the road. It seemed to us the pinnacle of privacy.

The plasterboard went up, the pink insulation and the ceiling tiles, the doors. In April, carpet was put down throughout the house. The furnace and appliances were installed, as was the wiring. The last thing to be constructed, or assembled rather, was the fireplace. The variously coloured stones for it had been delivered months too early and had lain outside all winter, buried under mounds of snow, protected only by a canvas tarp and a plastic sheet. My father had fretted all winter about the stones, certain he would find them split into pieces by the frost in the spring. But when the stonemason removed the coverings, the stones were all intact, protected from the cold by the snow, he said, as if this had been his plan all along. The whole family watched him build the fireplace, artfully trowelling the massive granite stones into place with cement. When the large grey granite mantelpiece was put in place, the house was finished.

We had lived in some indescribably dilapidated houses, at best in old houses maintained to minimum standards. We spent a winter in one house that had no refrigerator. We put our perishables outside on the steps, losing everything except the milk to neighbourhood dogs. One Friday my father, determined not to be deprived for the umpteenth time of bacon and eggs for his Saturday morning breakfast, stayed up all night, keeping guard in the porch over his pound of bacon on the veranda. Each time the pack of dogs advanced on the house, my father chased them off with a shovel that he wielded like a battle-axe. This was 1965. In another house we all awoke one morning to find it being painted by strangers who had been hired by the landlord who had neglected to tell us not only that the painters were coming but that the place was up for sale and we had a week to find somewhere else to live. We lived in a house without running water, kept our drinking water in a bucket on the porch, where in the winter the first few inches froze and we had to break the ice with an axe before we filled our glasses. The water was delicious but so cold it gave us headaches. We lived in a house beside a tavern, and between the two there was not so much as a fence or a patch of grass. The patrons brawled almost nightly in the gravel parking lot while we watched from our upstairs bedroom windows. In the backyard of one house, sewage ran raw from a ruptured septic tank, bubbling up from the ground like oil. In another house, my father chopped clean off with a hatchet the head of a rat, having waited hours for him to emerge from the basement drainage pipe.

But in this house, this tiny house, everything was new. My memories of our first days in it are not spoiled by the fact that within a year it became almost mythically dysfunctional. Impossibly, blessedly, everything worked for a while.