The Creek Houses

Describe something that intrigues you

I didn’t know anything about Don Sunderland until this afternoon. 

I didn’t know anything about his wife, Mary, or his parents, Dixie and Kenneth. Or about the two empty houses I drive by almost daily.

But now I do. Not much, nothing personal; but enough to paint an interesting picture in my mind.

Our area of NC is falling fast to the developers’ bulldozers. A thousand people a week move to “The Triangle” (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) and pastures, barns, ponds and farmhouses are rapidly being replaced by expensive, boxy townhouses. 

It’s sad… deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra famously said. The fields and woods I wandered through so contentedly as a boy in Florida now exist only in memory. West Boca Raton is unrecognizable from the place I knew in the 1970s. Instead of dirt roads and cypress domes, it’s eight-lane roads, strip malls and traffic.

One of my interests is exploring old houses, wandering through them, looking at stuff, trying to get an idea of who might have lived there. I ponder their lives, what life was like back then, whatever happened to them.

In particular, there are two houses not far from me just off the main road that are curiously placed. They sit on several acres, with woods and fields all around…but the houses are perched right at the edges of their parcels, as though the dwellings are straining toward one another.

I had to find out more. I decided to check them out a little closer after learning what I could from the property tax records and obituaries.

Don and Mary Sunderland (pseudonym) built the first one in 1967 on three acres. Don, born here in 1941, would have been 26. Mary was a year younger.

There was more emphasis on functionality than opulence. No-nonsense wood paneling, a simple brick fireplace, a deck out back that overlooked fields leading down to White Oak Creek. Made sense to me; married only five years, young Mary and Don probably put every penny into it with contractor-grade everything.

Unlike most of the houses I explore that have an assortment of irreplaceable personal stuff, their house was almost empty. Most of the drywall was off the studs and I could see from one end of the house to the other. I imagined it in a similar condition 58 summers ago but going up instead of falling down; Mary and Don watching their house being built, completely stoked as the Vietnam war raged and the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper.

According to his obit, Don retained a love of farming, and while he paid the mortgage courtesy of the Triangle Brick company, his free time was spent contentedly working his land and spending time with his six kids. I could picture them taking a dip in the creek during the dog days of August.

In 1976, Mary and Don bought the adjacent parcel and built a house for his parents, thus solving the mystery of why the two houses are so close. Don, then 35, was doing well and wanted his parents to have a comfortable retirement. Instead of fake wood paneling, it had 2600 square feet, tiled floors, chair rails and wainscoting. The master bath had a jetted tub and the kitchen cabinets were a step or two above builder grade. 

I stood between the two houses, lost in thought, trying to imagine it all those years ago. I supposed it was their Camelot era; and just as Sue and I used to spend weekends at my parents with the grandkids, it was probably pretty much the same with the Sunderlands. Don’s parents must have been tickled pink.

Sadly, it didn’t last long. After only three years, Don’s father Kenneth died at 68 in 1979. In another five years, tragedy struck again and Donnie…Mary and Don’s firstborn…died in 1984 at 21. I didn’t read any details in the obits.

The Sunderlands all drifted along for another quarter century after that, time changing little in their tiny corner of NC. Dixie continued to live next door as the grandkids grew, graduated, and pursued lives of their own. In 1997, the title was passed to Anita, the middle daughter, and she and her family moved in with Dixie.

Don passed away at 70 in 2011 after a long struggle with cancer.

Dixie, evidently a phlegmatic soul, drifted along contentedly, taking life as it came, until she finally passed away at 95 in 2015.

Mary joined them all in at 80 in 2020.

In 2021, both properties were inherited by Don and Mary’s surviving five children, and the next year, they sold it all to a developer. It’s slated to be part of a 100-acre Planned Urban Development.

Ecclesiastes 1:9 says “There is nothing new under the sun.” As I pondered the life and times of the Sunderlands, I saw many parallels to my own journey.

Our tiny FL neighborhood of seven houses was eventually surrounded on all sides by urban sprawl. New residents, like those here in NC, probably drove by without a passing thought. 

In the mid 90s, our 40-acre parcel was sold by the residents as a bloc to a developer, who started bulldozing everything the day after the moving trucks left. Townhouses now sit where palm trees we had planted by hand once stood. No one will ever know.

Where Don once watched his summer crop come in; where Kenneth and Dixie once played with their grandchildren on their front porch; and where the fireflies once danced on June nights…it, too, is remembered no more.

Like my boyhood wanderings far from home, Sunderlands probably enjoyed complete peace and privacy along White Oak creek. Now a paved greenway parallels it. Cyclists zoom madly, ringing their bells and weaving in and out of crowds. Pedestrians walk with earbuds, oblivious to the sounds of nature. Traffic sounds are rarely out of earshot.

The entire elder generation of Sunderlands are interred at the local Baptist church cemetery. I suppose this is where the analogy breaks down because my maternal grandparents are buried on the east coast of Florida, my paternal ones on the west coast, and Mom and Pop both rest in a military cemetery less than 20 miles from our old neighborhood. I won’t be resting with my ancestors.

And as I drove away, I felt the distinct impression of unseen faces in the windows watching me.

The old houses sighed; the glory years had been all too fleeting.

I think they liked that I got it.

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