Summary

The author begins this chapter, titled “A House that Needs Shingles,” with a detailed description of everything that her parents taught her about houses. Specifically, she talks about what her father taught her about building and construction, and what her mother taught her about marketing and selling. She says that she sometimes wonders where they and their love and knowledge of houses came from, their own parents not really caring much about where they lived. She describes how for her parents, “a current of time and meaning ran through every house,” meaning defined by “security, safety, stability, structure, home. All the things they valued more for having lacked. All the things they were never quite able to give me” (172). She then injects commentary on how government and banks manipulated the culture in the early part of the 20th Century to increase the...