Some Things Are
Worth Building Twice.

Before Augusta

I spent a big part of my early childhood in Waycross, Georgia. I lived with my grandparents for maybe the first five years of my life. In the same house my mother and my aunt grew up in. I learned how to ride a bike in that yard, shelled peas on the back porch with my Nanny (never called her grandma), and had an otherwise normal life.

I went to Porter’s Play School. I can’t really remember it, but I remember Nanny making me a lunch in a lunch box right long with my grandfather. My mother would come to visit about every two weeks.

When you’re that age, you have no concept of time. To be honest, for the longest, I remember it being one very long 2 weeks.

At that age, I didn’t know anything. However, I knew that I was loved.

What I understand now is that she was rebuilding her life after a divorce.

She had my older sister with her. My sister was old enough to do a little more for herself. I was still basically a baby, so I stayed in Waycross while my mother figured out what came next. I get it, you can move a lot faster when you have a kid that can walk vs. a baby in the arms.

As a kid, none of the sacrifice or logistics of somebody trying to put their life back together registered.

I just knew if I saw my mom it was 2 weeks, and I couldn’t have told you what two weeks was.

By 1985, we were living in Augusta in an apartment. My sister and I shared a room.

Then, in the summer of 1986, my mother and my aunt bought a house on Ansley Court.

My mother, my aunt, my sister and me.

I was six years old.

And as far as I was concerned, life was good.

The House

The backyard felt enormous, because it was. Not too far was a park. I used to walk there by myself (I’m a for real 80’s baby; we were allowed to do that).

There was a creek that I played around in. My cousins and I would have all kinds of adventures. We chased lightning bugs and would just be outside (until the Nintendo era lol).

There was always something going on.

When I think about being a kid in that house, there is not a single bad memory. Mickey Mouse pancakes on Saturday mornings, waking up to my bedroom door being decorated on my birthday, riding my bike at breakneck speeds through the same woods I walked because I knew them like the back of my hand.

The simplest way I can put it is:

It was home.

Eventually we moved back south, toward Waycross. My Nanny died, and it was the first real death I experienced. My mom wanted to be closer to my grandfather, and it’s not like I had a say in it, lol.

My aunt stayed in Augusta. My mother, sister and I were back and forth. Summers, school clothes, sometimes just to visit. Eventually as I got older that slowed down.

Then more tragedy struck my family. My mother passed my senior year. My aunt retired from teaching and she legit traveled the world. The house...well

You know what we do in the South, a house can turn into a mausoleum of sorts. You might come and check on it, but it stays as it is. At least that was my interpretation.

See, the memories live in the house as it was. Changing things almost means erasure. I wish I had more "old" photos but as I said, I’m an 80’s baby, and we weren’t just taking photos of everything like we might do in this modern age we are living in.

The place aged, obviously. Houses do that. Things needed work. Styles changed. Appliances got old.

But the memories are still there.

Same wood cabinets. Same layout. Same little peninsula sticking out into the room.

This house never changed.

For a long time, that was enough.

Rome

Years later, I took a trip to Italy.

At one point I was in Rome, standing near the Colosseum, looking out over the area where Circus Maximus used to be.

I had one of those pictures in my hand that shows you what the place looked like when it was actually there.

So I’m standing in the present, holding this reconstruction of the past, looking at what’s left.

And I started thinking about this idea you see attributed to Marcus Aurelius, about how everything eventually disappears. Everything turns to dust.

I remember looking out there and thinking:

I don’t know if I believe that.

Maybe things don’t last forever in the exact form they started in. Look at Italy itself. They can’t stick a shovel in the ground without finding something from the 17th century that was something else from centuries earlier that was repurposed. Marc, you got this wrong buddy!

Because I think some things can last if somebody decides they still matter.

I didn’t fly home from Italy with a renovation plan in my suitcase.

It wasn’t that dramatic, but I was having my own internal struggles.

But somewhere around that moment, I started looking at the house differently. I could feel it.

First, I Had to Get My Auntie to Trust Me to Do This

Having an idea was one thing. Convincing my aunt, who has been here every day of my life, was a different story.

That house wasn’t mine to just start knocking holes in.

My aunt had kept it all those years. Those were her memories behind that door and inside of those walls.

And if I was going to do what I had in mind, I needed her to trust me with something that had been part of our family for decades.

That was probably the hardest decision in the whole project.

Not which flooring.

Not cabinets.

Not contractors.

Getting my auntie to say, essentially, Okay. I trust you. Do what you think you need to do.

Eventually, she did.

I had been looking at that kitchen since I was six years old, and I could tell you where everything was. Now...I’m going to tell you what it can do.

And in 2023, we got to work.

I found some of the greatest contractors in the history of life.

That is not even an exaggeration.

We opened the place up. Walls came down. Rooms changed. The old kitchen disappeared.

There were points where you could stand inside that house and barely recognize the place.

And then, somewhere in the middle of all of that mess, this showed up:

ART.

Nobody sat down in a conference room and came up with that.

Nobody wrote a brand brief.

It was just there.

Eventually, the house got a name.

Artful Ansley.

The “Ansley” part was obvious.

The rest sort of found us.

Then It Worked, for Real.

People can say what they want but they can’t forget the part where they say, “and he did that!”

I finished the house.

I furnished it.

Put art on the walls.

Opened the doors.

And people started coming.

Golf trips. Family trips. People in town for tournaments. Work. Weekends.

For about six months, Artful Ansley was doing exactly what I had known it would do.

People were using the house again.

Then Hurricane Helene showed up, and showed her natural a**.

The Tree

Back to that text message.

I drove to Augusta to see it for myself.

There was destruction everywhere.

Trees down. Power out. Debris all over the place.

And then I got to Ansley Court.

Yep.

Tree on the house.

I climbed around, looked at the damage, then went inside.

And this is the part that still makes me laugh.

The inside looked immaculate.

Natural disaster outside.

Inside?

Artful Ansley.

Still sitting there looking like somebody could check in that afternoon.

Obviously they couldn’t.

But for some reason that made the whole thing funnier.

I called my general contractor.

We started figuring out what had to happen.

I didn’t really have much time to sit around pontificating on how man plans and God laughs, because somewhere in the middle of all this, my phone went off again!

A family from Australia had booked Artful Ansley for Masters.

Now I had a deadline.

So We Built It Again

That was pretty much it.

The house had been running for about six months.

Then it was down for about six months.

Roof. Repairs. Restoration. Getting everything back where it needed to be.

And I got it done, again.

In time for Masters.

The Australian family came.

People started walking through the doors again.