Marion and Mira at the Raymond Farm.

My parents married in Los Angeles in February of 1941 and moved to Seattle where Dad began his first furniture business. In 1942, they were incarcerated on the Idaho desert. Thanks to my father’s architecture professor at MIT, we were invited to live on the Antonin Raymond Farm in Pennsylvania in 1943 to tend the chickens.

In 1945, we moved to an old, small cottage on Aquetong Road with a hand pump for water, a wood-coal stove for heat and cooking, and my father continued making furniture in the garage.

In 1947, he discovered a property with a south-facing slope and persuaded the farmer who owned it to let him live on 3 acres in exchange for labor on his farm. We lived in an old army tent while Dad built his workshop first. My mother and I visited her ailing father in California while my father enclosed the first section of the house.

He dug the foundation, poured the concrete for it and a cistern to store water, as we didn’t have enough money to drill a well, and built the stone wall and wooden framework literally with his own two hands. He found trees in the woods to make posts to hold the roof up, an old barn beam strong enough to do the job, designed and built the concrete fireplace, and poured all the concrete roof-tiles for our first roof. When my mother and I returned from California, Dad had enclosed the living area well enough for us to survive the winter, but aside from the Kitchen and Bath, the Living Room was the entire house.

I remember the old bathroom had a sliding shoji window one could open and look outside if you wanted to from the toilet chamber. The bath chamber was tiled in flagstone, with a small potbelly stove to heat the water in a rectangular fragrant cedar wooden bathtub.

We took a hot bath once a week, as it took nearly two hours for the water to get heat up; as in Japan, we all washed and showered thoroughly before immersing ourselves; Dad would extricate me and call me a “boiled lobster” because I was all red from the heat!

It must have been around 1954 when Dad replaced the wooden bathtub with a conventional porcelain tub.  As my mother was suffering from arthritis, she was treated at an herbal spa for several weeks in Japan and came home with a large bag of herbs which my father insisted on putting into her bathwater and soaking her daily.

Mira creating her fusuma mural. © Ezra Stoller/Esto

I remember studying the grain in the wood of those bedroom walls, imagining all kinds of creatures living there looking at me, and doing my homework at the desk along the sunny corridor which eventually had sliding shoji screens I could pull closed. I grew up an only child, so my stuffed animals and dolls, some of them made by “Grandma Jonesie,” the cartoonist Chuck Jones’ mother, were my companions and playmates.

When my brother came along in 1954, Dad designed and built a downstairs bedroom for me where he also housed the new hot-water heating system for the house powered by an oil burner.

My room was large and sunny, and had a door which opened onto the back porch and sliding glass-door corridor on the south side of the building. There was a large cherry built-in chest of drawers along my bedroom south wall, and a desk facing West, so the sunlight came in over my shoulder when I was studying.

I don’t think there was much insulation in the walls or ceiling, so it was cold in the wintertime and I used an electric heater, but the room was big enough for a small upright piano, so I used to practice there when I started piano lessons.

Bedroom addition. © Ezra Stoller/Esto

Marion, Mira, and baby Satoru.

Soon thereafter, my mother had a party for us with pink champagne and popcorn and sent us off to Pittsburgh with Dad driving the old T-bird and baby equipment from the Krosnicks’ strapped to the top of the car.

That was my last memory of being in that house; in 1968 or so, my father announced that he had purchased some property across the road and was going to build us a house there, which he did. We moved back around 1970 with our three young children.