A Home of Our Own
Frances Lacey, a widow, works at a factory that produces potato chips. She is fired when one of the men gropes her, and she hits him in return. The same day, her son is brought home by the police, for stealing change from payphones, but they don't press charges. Shortly after this, Frances decides that Los Angeles is not the place to raise a family. She packs the kids up, sells everything they can't carry, and starts driving. She figures she'll know where she's going when she sees it. Their meager resources get them as far as Hankston, Idaho, where Frances spots the unfinished frame of a wood house a few miles outside town, across the road from Moon's Nursery. Finding that the proprietor of the nursery, Mr. Munimura, is the owner of the property, though virtually penniless, Frances proposes to buy it from him in exchange for work by her and her children, whom she collectively calls the "Lacey Tribe".
With winter approaching, the Laceys work hard to make the house habitable. Frances finds a job as a waitress in the coffee shop at a bowling alley in Hankston and puts every dollar she can spare into improvement of the house. Murray inadvertently burns the house down in the dead of winter, and the family loses everything they own.
The family is picking through the charred remains of the house when Frances finds their meager savings in a blackened jar. Hope is reborn for Frances, but eldest son Shayne angrily demands a reality check. When rebuilding seems impossible, Mr. Munimura arrives with professional town folk and supplies to rebuild. Whether stubborn independent Frances likes it or not, rebuilding has started as Mr. Munimura gives her a comforting hug. Frances relents, but true to character, she states that all will be paid back. Toys, clothes, and blankets are also provided for the children. Frances only lets them build the house as far as it was before the fire. Shayne, narrating, says that it took them six months to finish the rest of the house, and four years to pay everyone back, but that it brought them all closer together as a family. Even though he hated Idaho at first, he still lives there, and has never been back to Los Angeles.
autobiographical