16 February 1947
Just two days after Valentine’s Day, Donnie was completely smitten. Within the remaining weeks of the past month, he had managed to ask out Eliza Payton and the passing holiday marked their second date. He was sitting out on his porch, in an old rocking chair he’d bought at a garage sale the week before, simply enjoying the weather. Sitting in Donnie’s lap was a pad of paper, in which he was sketching the house across from his.
The house’s owner, Martha Keebler, a seventy-three-year-old woman with shaky bones, was just outside of the house, fussing under her breath about what the cold weather had done to her mint leaves. When she noticed Donnie, a smile grew on her face and she waved at him, yelling, “Good morning!”
He returned her gentle smile and shouted back, “G’morning, Mrs. Keebler!” The old woman quickly went back to fretting about her plants and Donnie decided to implement her into his drawing. Grinning to himself, he began thinking of Eliza and doodling hearts all over the margin of the paper.

25 May 1947
Eliza and Donnie were on the kitchen counter, closely listening to the radio to here today’s news. “…citizens of our country are finally able to buy brand new cars since World War II. Some darker news, a coal dust explosion in the Centralia Co.’s Mine number five kills one hundred and eleven…” Donnie turned the radio down and cleared his throat, attempting to shoot a calm smile at his girlfriend.
Eliza met his eyes. “Why’re you looking at me like that?” To break the awkwardness, she laughed lightly.
“Nothing. I just had a bit of a preposition.” He stood up and made a short trip to the refrigerator, opening it up and retrieving a pitcher of green tea. Eliza waited patiently for him to continue his spiel. “Want some?” Donnie asked, pulling out two narrow glasses before she had the chance to answer.  As he poured the tea into the glasses, he said, “We should get married.”
Eliza made a choking sound. “Today? Like, right now?”
Donnie laughed at her and carried the cups back to the counter. “No, not today. Soon, Eliza, we should get married soon. In four months, at the max.” He was anxious for her reply, a little scared that she would blatantly refuse his offer. After five minutes passed with no reply, Donnie began to wonder if he asked her too soon.
“Okay,” she said, hopping from the counter.
The sound of her voice brought Donnie out of his thoughts. “What’d you say?”
She left her cup on the counter and went over to the telephone, beginning to dial numbers. “I’m calling my parents to share the good news, okay?”
Donnie began grinning and walked over to the cabinets, too excited to contain his astonishment because—wow—she actually said yes. There’s nothing more for her to say than “I do,” right?

24 September 1948
He sat on the sofa, flicking through wedding photos from the year before while his wife fed a bottle to the baby. Donnie and Eliza had been married for a year and twenty days now, and added a member to the family just two days ago. As Donnie smiled at the pictures sitting in his lap, Eliza hushed their newborn male with a bottle of milk. His wife had been dressed in white, grinning at the camera with her arm tossed over Donnie’s shoulders and her hand tightly gripping a bouquet of flowers.
Donnie flipped the page and the baby cried. Setting the photo album on the cushion adjacent to the left arm of the couch, he stood up to relieve Eliza of their son. “There’s only so much that Elijah can take of you, women,” he joked. “Y’know us men.”
Eliza lightly swatted Donnie on the arm, sticking her tongue out. “Y’know us women do pretty great things for the world. Without women, you wouldn’t be here. You can’t make babies just by staring at a wall and declaring your masculinity.” As Donnie sat back down on the couch, Eliza stood up with the intentions to start lunch.
“Shh,” Donnie laughed. “My son doesn’t need to be poisoned by your vulgarity.” He gave his son the bottle back, the top of the bottle disappearing into Elijah’s mouth.
Elijah Yorks looked like his dad—curly, russet hair, freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose, and thick eyebrows. He was a bit of a funny looking kid. Unlike his dad’s green eyes, though, he was given hazel eyes like his mother’s. Along with that, there were small dimples that formed at the corners of his mouth when he smiled. Elijah squealed, signaling Donnie that he was done with the milk.
He sat the bottle down on the coffee table in front of him and repositioned Elijah on his shoulder to burp him. When Elijah spit up on Donnie’s shoulder, he tried to hide the fact that he was disgusted because—honestly—being spit up on was rather gross. If he had to admit it, though, Donnie was happy with his pro-creation.

12 November 1950
Elijah was leaning over the back of the sofa, staring out the window. Eliza was stirring cream in a mug of coffee. Donnie was downtown due to the fact that he had recently been hired to paint a building for the state. Next door, a family was moving in the vacant house that sat to the right of them.
“Mommy, look!” Elijah shouted, pressing his palms flat against the window. “New people! Can I go play with them?”
Furrowing her eyebrows, Eliza ditched her coffee on the coffee table and took position next to her son. The family moving in next door was a three-piece family of blacks, unloading a small white car of suitcases. “I don’t know,” she mumbled. “If you want, we could make them a home welcoming gift. How does cookies sound?”
Elijah leaned toward his mom, attempting to throw his arms around her shoulder. “Chocolate chip?” Eliza nodded her head and stood up from the couch, taking Elijah with her. She embraced the two-year-old in her arms as she made the trek to the kitchen, covering him in kisses while he laughed.
Once in the kitchen, she set Elijah down on the counter, ordering him to sit still. Over the past three years, the kitchen had become more like home. It no longer looked like the barren corner of empty cupboards. Eliza had practically furnished the kitchen with her existence, taping pictures of her and Donnie on the refrigerator and flourishing counter corners with small cactus plants.
With a sigh, she began to search the cabinets for ingredients. “Okay, Eli, what all do we need? Tell me what you remember from the last time we made cookies.”
“Umm,” he starts, bringing his arm up to scratch his head, his blue and green flannel lifting up at the torso. “Chocolate chips…flour…umm, white sand?”
Eliza bit her lip, turning to face Elijah with the bag of flour in her hand. She did her best to stifle her laugh and set the flour down, going to muddle Elijah’s curly hair. “Eli, what is white sand? Is it what the stuff I put in your cereal every morning?”
Elijah nodded fervently, clasping his hands together. “Mm, Daddy told me that it was white sand. But he told me not to eat the brown sand. Brown sand makes people sick.”
She shook her head and turned to get the chocolate chips down. “It’s not white sand, Eli. Your daddy was wrong. It’s called sugar.”

Donnie returned home, his face smeared with black paint, to the smell of cookies. He dropped his workbag next the front door and headed toward the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator door and withdrew the carton of milk. Unscrewing the cap, he tilted his head back and drank from.
  “Donnie Zachary Yorks, we’ve talked about this several times,” Eliza whined. “Please, get a cup.” Groaning, she told Elijah to step back as she prepared to take the cookies out of the oven.
Donnie shrugged his shoulders and put the milk back in its designated home. “Those are for me, right?” As he asked the question, his voice sounded bland, almost sad even. There was no humorous tone in his voice.
She relocated the cookies to a yellow-painted plate, doing her best to not scorch her fingers. Elijah held on to her pants leg and shook his head. “No,” the toddler voiced. “We made them for the new neighbors.”
“I can’t even have one?” Donnie asked, leaning against the refrigerator.
With a soft smile, Eliza held the plate out to her husband. “Only one, okay? Eli really wanted to do something special for the neighbors. He wants to make new friends.” To her, her husband looked despondent and bothered. She made a mental note to talk with him later.
As the cookies cooled, Eliza and her son walked next door with the intent of making them feel welcomed. “Knock, knock,” Elijah sang. He waited patiently, his arms swaying at his sides as he kept his focus on the blue door in front of him. Eliza is anxious, hoping that Elijah wont get disappointed.
About three minutes later, the blue door opened, revealing a tall, African American male wearing a plaid button-down. For a few seconds, he said nothing. Instead, he looked Eliza and her young up and down, evaluating them. “Can I help you?”
“Do you want chocolate chip cookies?” Elijah offered with a ridiculous, child-like smile plastered on his face. “We can be friends!”
The man looked around before leaning in really close toward Eliza, towering over her by a little more than three inches. “They ain’t poisoned, right?” he whispers. “’Bout three weeks ago, a lady tried to kill my little Darcy with some suckers.” He scratched the back of his neck, attempting to smile.
“Jesus Christ, no. I’d never dream of doing that,” Eliza reassured him, managing to give a soft smile.
“Oh, well, thank y’all two.” He reached to relieve her of the plate of cookies, taking one for himself. “Oh, and I’m William Johnson. Nice to meet y’all.”
The two-year-old placed his hands on his chest, looking up to try and meet eye contact with William Johnson. “I’m Elijah and this is my momma, Liza.”
“Eliza,” she corrected him. “My name is Eliza Yorks.” Grabbing her son’s hand, she turned to walk back to her house next door. “Welcome to the neighborhood!”
“Thank y’all and God bless you!”

The next day, the York family woke up to the sound of their house being surfaced by eggs and the words “n***** lovers” painted on their living room window.

11 September 1954
Elijah sat on the sofa, with a pout on his face.
His first day of kindergarten had been horrible. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich that his mom had made him had grown soggy by lunchtime and he had a hard time finding someone to play with during recess. Because of his inability to make friends, the other kids made fun of him.
The day before, Elijah had been excited to attend school. To be frank, he was tired of sitting at home and getting chastised for coloring on Mommy’s white walls that Daddy had worked so hard to paint. Now that he’d gotten a taste of how school really was, though, he dreaded the idea of leaving the house.
Over the past eight years, the house had already begun showing its age. Though it still looked modern, the paint had paled and the small corners of it had began chipping off, either by the awful things that the house had been splattered with or simply because of the weather.
Donnie came out of the kitchen and set a plate of strawberries and grapes down on the coffee table. “Want some, bud?” With a sigh, the six-year-old shook his head. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t like school,” he whined. “The kids are mean. Why can’t I go to school with Darcy? She always comes home smiling.” For two years, he had watched Darcy come and go to school, always returning with something to be happy about.
Donnie sighed, taking a seat next to his son. “It’ll get better, I promise. You’ll be able to go to school with Darcy soon. Just keep hoping, okay?”

10 August 1961
It wasn’t until Elijah was in eighth grade that he and Darcy could finally go to school together. Only, they really couldn’t because Elijah was attending middle school and Darcy was starting her first year of high school.
Over the course of the years, a lot had happened, mainly in 1954. Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black teenager, had been killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. Rosa Parks, an old black woman of Alabama, had been penalized and sent to jail for refusing to move to the back of a city bus. But the United States of America was slowly changing, slowly desegregating.
As America was changing, the Yorks’ Müller Road home in Ohio was rapidly changing, as well. The month before, Donnie had worked with William and Yolanda, William’s wife, to repaint his home a vivid yellow. The moment had been captured in photos that Eliza had taken while Elijah and Darcy served lemonade and sugar cookies to the adults at work.
That Thursday wasn’t much different. The only difference was that that day, Elijah proposed to Darcy with a small box of Boston Baked Beans and to satisfy her younger friend, she said yes.

12 May 1974
About thirty years later since the house had been built, Donnie and Eliza had moved to a retirement facility together about an hour away from the house on Müller Road. They had left the house in Elijah’s name, giving him leisure to do whatever he may with it. In honor of his parents, Elijah had the words Yorks Estate painted on the mailbox next to the address.
The Johnson family had longed moved out, what with all the pressure on African Americans during the 1950s and the 1960s. Despite this, though, Darcy still co-existed alongside of Elijah. She had grown taller, her previous 4’11” stature increasing to a 5’6”. Elijah had grown taller, too. Over the course of twenty years, he had grown to a maximum of a foot taller, leaving him at 5’9”. And the two of them were newly engaged, due to marry at the end of October in a chapel down the street.
Together, the two of them would start a generation of their own, weathering the house down and morphing it so that it fit their living requirements. And each generation to come would have a story to tell just like Donnie.