The George and Anita Kallus House

Photo by Dougal Cormie

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 

-William Faulkner 

On the west side of Hallettsville in Lavaca County, there’s a large, white house on Highway Alt. 90 that’s been vacant since 2010. It’s my maternal grandparents’ house and my grandmother (our Datu) lived there for over 70 years. (Her husband died in 1979.) My mother (born in 1947) and all her siblings were brought home from the hospital to that house, except my Uncle A. J., who was born inside in June of 1940, when the Lavaca River rose so high, my grandparents couldn’t get to the hospital.

Though my grandmother died in 2012, the family still owns the house and has been gathering there ever since. As a complete group, we’ve gotten together only once a year, if that, but smaller groups of us have met there for Easter, for my brother’s 40th birthday, to attend various events in Hallettsville, to retreat from our busy lives for a weekend, or just to visit with each other. In 2019, we held our first-ever Kallus reunion there, throwing a family chili cook-off as a way to feed everyone over the busy weekend of catching up with each other.

In the house’s heyday, before great grandchildren were born, there were at least 30 to 40 of us for a sit down meal for Christmas, at tables lined up down the center of the den. Adult couples got the bedrooms when we slept over and we children would sleep on pallets end to end in the living room. At any one time, there might be beer drinking on the back porch, children getting into trouble in the workshop, teenagers sequestered in the bedrooms in private conversations, women cleaning up in the kitchen while men played a game of taroky in the living room, and people watching a football game playing on TV in the den. These scenes repeated themselves with variations for Easter, when family visited for a reunion or a local wedding or a cookoff, my grandmother’s birthday, maybe July 4th.

The house, for me, is the quintessential idea of home. In my dreams, it often stands in as generic “house” or “home”. There is a simultaneous feeling of comfort and sadness being there since my grandmother passed. I know the pattern of the cracks in the sheetrock in a particular room, the sound of the traffic on Alt. 90 whooshing right past the front of the house, the musty smell of the walk-in pantry. Most knick-knacks have been distributed to grandchildren or donated to charity, but some are still sitting in their place since I was child, or for so long that it seems like since I was a child. Each of the five bedrooms has a name… Datu and PawPaw’s Room, the Nursery, Bobby’s Room, the Piano Room, and the Back Bedroom. I like to sleep in the nursery, so named because it does indeed have a baby bed in it, but also a mid-century modern bedroom suite with a full-sized bed. It is the room closest to my grandparents’ bedroom and in which most toys were kept for grandchildren and great grandchildren visiting.

By far my favorite room, however, is the kitchen. It is huge, accommodating much hugging and kissing and visiting and dogs and running children while also allowing for cooking great quantities of food. More memories have been made there than in any other room in the house. The room, and it’s breakfast table seating 8, has hosted Scrabble games and heated political discussions, tearful confessions, birthday gatherings, coffee the morning of my mother’s funeral and a surreal but heartfelt birthday dinner for my father the night before, much drinking, the hatching of grand plans, breastfeeding babies, hours of drawing and coloring, late night confessions, and recipe fails and successes. And that’s just on my own visits there. The memory of my grandmother and a feeling of comfort linger over these activities like the smell of a cake in the kitchen after it’s been carted off to a family reunion. The cake is gone, but you have the sense that if you opened the oven, it would still be there. My grandmother did not die in the house, so it is not her ghost there. She LIVED in the house, so in a more powerful way, her presence is still there.



As a family, we perpetuate this feeling. There is a small chalkboard near the back door, where cousins who visit now write notes to Datu thanking her for the hospitality of the house. And when we’re busy cooking, we use phrases like “I wonder if Datu has…” or “I wonder where Datu keeps…” meaning “I wonder if there is XX in the house right now.” The house embodies her spirit of nurturing, love, and constancy. Without fail, I will see a “redbird” (as my grandmother called cardinals) in the backyard when I’m there, perching in the huge pecan tree to see who’s visiting, and I cannot help but think of the folk belief about cardinals carrying the souls of dead loved ones. My own mother passed last year and for her, the house seemed like a security blanket. Being there was a way for her to be close to her own mother as my mother battled cancer.

Though meals at the house now are certainly not the same as they were decades ago, we have consciously carried on food-related traditions that honor my grandparents. We might prepare food there to take to the annual Morkovsky reunion at the local Knights of Columbus Hall. We meet annually for a Christmas gathering during which we eat foods that have been traditional in our family for the holiday for 100 years. The house acts as a base of sorts, too, to stage canning efforts from local produce, and winemaking efforts from the grapes growing next to the barn behind the house. A few times, I’ve combed through and cooked dishes from my grandmother’s mass of recipes collected over 70 years. She passed when she was 96 and lived in the house from 1937 until maybe two years before she died. I marvel at how many tens of thousands of meals she prepared in that kitchen. Seventy years times 365 days times three meals a day is 76,650 meals. There are still recipes taped inside cabinet doors for staple dishes my grandmother relied on to feed a husband, eight children, their children, and their children, not to mention friends, other family members, local priests, her children’s friends, etc.

I don’t know how much longer our family will own the house and have it at which to gather, so I try to cherish my time there, like I know my mother did. Our second annual Kallus Reunion and Chili Cookoff scheduled for July 2020 was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But on my last visit to the house, I put up garlic dill pickles, helped my brother bottle wine he’d had fermenting there, and baked a lemon pound cake my grandmother submitted to a Catholic Daughters of America cookbook I found in her kitchen called “Favorite Recipes” (Court Sacred Heart No. 797, Hallettsville, TX). Recipe below.

In the mornings when I’m there, I’m up before my children. I open the side door and the living room blinds to let light in. I shuffle around the kitchen in my robe making coffee or unloading the dishwasher, thinking about my mother shuffling around the kitchen in her robe before I got up, thinking about her mother shuffling around the kitchen in her housecoat before everyone else got up. Visits to my Kallus grandparents’ house have changed dramatically since I was a child, but they keep nourishing my soul in different ways. I continue to make memories of new gatherings there, surrounded by old comforts and the familiar, ever-present past.