This is a year of double milestones: my mother’s house turns 75 and (as of October 30) she will have been living there for 50 years.

She grew up as part of an itinerant sharecropping family during the Great Depression, so I’m glad she has enjoyed all these decades of stability. (I lived in the house from age 10 to age 31.)

One of Mom’s friends dubbed the property “El Rancho Rocky” because of the ample supply of limestone, but the Tyree family pulled together to make something of the place. (Mom was 91 when she finally gave up mowing the five-acre yard for herself.)

Much has changed about the T...