#128: That Old House Ain't Got Me Anymore

How grateful I am to have moved on from a house that I should never have bought.

The quiet hours of night are reluctantly giving themselves over to morning. I pad out to the living room in old slippers and my flannel nightgown, a shawl wrapped around my shoulders. Set the fire. Kettle on for tea. What will be first today? Read, write, cook, walk?

Soup is often my daily meal during this time. Lentils, beans—white, red or black—garlic, onions, carrots, celery, herbs, spices, maybe a ham hock. I watch my hands feel their way through wordless recipes and wonder Is this how our grandmothers did it?

This is the season of introspection and, living alone as I do, I am able to set aside time for that. Revisiting foundation moments, I see they have made me who I am.

Yesterday, my long time friend Nancy sends me a photo of me at forty-four holding my godchild. My hair was long and dark…almost black. The smile I see is echoed in the lines on my face today. I was living on ten acres in a 25-year old house hung on twenty-eight huge posts from trees harvested on that land. They had then been driven into the ground with a pile driver. It was known as The Tree House. The view was great, but the house was someone else’s dream—the original owner? the architect? my wuzband? During my time there it became a nightmare.

It took three forms of heat, wood stove, pellet stove, baseboards and quilts and blankets hung over openings and and windows, to keep it barely at 62F during the winter. It came with a “temporary” phone line, that decades before should have been trenched up the old mile-long logging road driveway that needed four-wheel drive year-round. It was snagged nearly weekly by deer leaving me without service. There were no cell phones back then so when I complained about no or very intermittent service they once brought me a big box SatNav phone so I would have access to 911 if needed. I was single-mom-ing with a 9-year old boy.

I could put my foot through the deck and see the ground thirty-five feet below plus one of the corners sagged from the weight of a hot tub. There was a hillside mountain coming down behind the poorly placed shop building. Pack-rats, shrews, flying squirrels, bats, carpenter ants were my housemates. I had to be bat-shit crazy for agreeing to buy this place in the first place and, when my wuzband left our son and me a few months later, I had neither tools or skills or enough money to handle the maintenance and repairs it required to survive there. It took me two long years to sell it and when I finally found a buyer, a house inspection revealed that those big trees that the house was hung on had split at the bottom and were rotting from the inside out…a story for another time. I see those lines on my face now, too.

During those first few months of living at The Tree House, I had little idea of what was coming.

A house is a living being, and it isn’t always benign.
—-Sharon Blackie

When a house is “on the market” I think most of us would agree we keep it clean, tidy, and inviting for a potential buyer. Floors swept, bathroom sparkling, kitchen clean, counters spotless, everything put away. “Staged” is the word. I gussied it up each day before locking the door and heading into town to teach piano at a small studio I was renting. Ferrying students up and down the logging road was not an option. Late one afternoon when I returned, I walked into my clean and tidy staged kitchen to find my chef’s knife laying on the counter. I thought, OK…I don’t remember leaving this out. But, maybe I did. Then I looked closer. What the heck? The tip of the knife is broken off! That is something I would have remembered doing.

The kitchen. I still have the Viking range and the pots and pans.

I called my friend Nancy and told her what had happened. She already knew that in previous months there had been windows that shattered for no apparent reason and walls weeping during pelting rains. I had also told her the stories I had learned from the neighbors about each and every previous owner losing a husband or partner through divorce or death while living up there. Now, I was telling her about my knife missing two inches of its tip. If felt creepy. She told me to pack a bag with a few clothes and essentials and get out of there now…and I did.

I never spent another night in that house.

So my friends, here’s my question to you. Have you ever lived in a house that you felt just wanted to keep you there and eat you alive? As Sharon Blackie says, “A house is a living being, and it isn’t always benign.”

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Song for Today

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What I’m Reading

• The Honest Broker: How Neuroscience Confirms the Most Ancient Myths About Music
  “I almost felt as if I were an observer to the music-making, not an active participant.” —Ted Gioia
  I had an experience very similar to what he describes in this piece playing piano in a recording session. It was as if I could hear what my hands were playing before they did…and I just watched them as they did it.

  How Neuroscience Confirms the Most Ancient Myths About Music

• Dirt by Bill Buford
  At the beginning of this book I found myself talking back to the author. Later I cried, and loved it at the end.

• The New Yorker

  Last month I included a photo of a doll house with a woman on the floor, rolling pin on table, and pie about to fall out of the oven. Here’s an article about Frances Glessner Lee who created the scenes.