In Grover Cleveland’s Childhood Home

Here, on Redfin, is Grover Cleveland’s childhood home. Price: $295,000. 

Despite my undergraduate degree in history, my knowledge of Grover Cleveland is scant. I can only pick him out of a presidential lineup if he’s included twice for his nonconsecutive terms. A Google search reveals a mustache and a vague Theodore Roosevelt vibe, though I might be romanticizing since I now want to live in his childhood home. 

The house, somewhat over our budget, otherwise checks the boxes: 1,500 square feet, two stories, hardwood floors. “Probably original,” says my husband, and not in a complimentary way. After seeing Grover Cleveland’s childhood kitchen, Bryan is voting no. 

Our daughter is voting no to the entire move to upstate New York. She wants to live in her childhood home, a teal house in California with orange trees in the backyard and lizards sunning on the wall. 

Grover Cleveland’s childhood home sits upon a grassy lot where he once played boyish pranks on the neighbors. Inside is the only shiplap tub I’ve seen on Redfin. The rooms are dim and the wallpaper runs floral, but the built-ins and staircase banister are as charming as time. The house has white siding, welcoming front steps, and a placard announcing that this building is historically important and the people living inside are remarkable. 

In Grover Cleveland’s childhood home, I’ll be so busy baking sourdough bread and reading poetry that I’ll rarely scroll the internet. I’ll play Barbies with my daughter without finding it excruciating. And we’ll host dinner parties. Historical, of course. I’ll be me, but more fascinating.  

What actually happens is this: On the exact day someone else buys Grover Cleveland’s childhood home, we move into an adjacent neighborhood in upstate New York, a place where folks walk their dogs twice a day and children roam between houses. Because we don’t live in Grover Cleveland’s childhood home, I never join the women’s rugby team or take up knitting. I host exactly zero historical dinner parties. I remain ordinary—by which I mean myself—in every way, even as I paint walls and settle into new routines. We watch nuthatches out the kitchen window, play Wordle, walk our dogs by the Erie Canal. 

And after school, my daughter shouts a new friend’s name and where they’re going, and she runs out into the day, the way children used to, the way I suppose Grover Cleveland once did when he lived in his childhood home.  

Sari Fordham is a writer, professor, and environmental activist. Her memoir, Wait for God to Notice, narrates her childhood in Uganda. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Passages North, Brevity, The Best of the Net series, and Booth, among others. She is the author of a free monthly newsletter, Cool It: Simple Steps to Save the Planet.

This essay first appeared at Electric Literature (2024).