It was my grandmother Elizabeth’s sanctuary first. Then it became mine.
Growing up, money was always tight in my parents’ world. They wore stress the way other people wore perfume, constant, unavoidable, seeping into everything. My dad, Robert, worked at a factory and carried resentment like a toolbox. My mom, Diana, bounced between receptionist jobs and always looked exhausted. They reminded me constantly that I cost money: school supplies, doctor visits, the extra grocery item I asked for.
“Every dollar we spend on you,” my father would say, “is a dollar we can’t spend on ourselves.”
It wasn’t said like a joke. It was said like I should apologize for being alive.
My grandmother was different. Elizabeth Davis built her own real estate portfolio after my grandfather died young. She didn’t talk about hardship like it was fate; she talked about it like it was a problem to be solved. She’d survived widowhood at thirty-two with a mortgage and a son she loved more than he deserved, and she turned that survival into fluency. She understood property the way musicians understand scales: the fundamentals were so deeply embedded that everything she played sounded effortless.
