The Life of a House

The renovation fantasies are blooming, like the mold on the ceiling of my ventless bathroom. We are aggressively flirting with the idea of home improvement for the first time in our long romance with this lovely old house. Maybe we can save her, and ourselves in the process.

All these years of classic American middle-class angst — paycheck to paycheck, monster mortgage, no vacations — and here we are. Low interest rates, decent equity, and mid-life crises are combining to make restoration a very real and delicious prospect.

Home is a well-worn, civil war era farmhouse with lots of charm and loads of problems. We love the beast irrationally, perhaps — her broad, graceful staircase in the center hall entrance that makes me feel haughty and glamorous upon descent — or, sometimes, giddy and musical, like a fairy-tale princess. Her tall, stately windows with old wavy glass, her high ceilings and rambling layout. She has seduced us and we have been happy and fruitful in her embrace.

But an old house is an old house, after all — she is showing her age and experience in myriad ways. Poor insulation, rotting wood, a leaky roof and a sagging porch are just the tip of the iceberg.

The bathroom has become an embarrassment to her 19th century grandeur — a rickety fiberglass shower that can only be operated with the rusty old pliers in residence. Bus station linoleum floors, without the chutzpah to be truly ugly, curling up in the corners — we’ve nailed the edges down and now little circles of rust are blossoming around the nails (the handyman gene skipped a generation). The tub is an old clawfoot behemoth, peeling and pitted, that worked well enough for endless dirty child dips, but has since become a repository for plants and bags of cat litter. The plumbing predates disco and the whole sad affair is surrounded in peeling, trite wallpaper entirely too proud of its pink.

Our youngest child’s bedroom is a relic of crumbling plaster and busy floral wallpaper from the 30s. She hates it and, trust me, a teenager’s hate is not like yours and mine. This is ruining her life.

When we moved in, almost 20 years ago, I was heavy with the fourth child, three small boys spinning around me like mad tops. I lumbered through the wide front doors, dropped my bags and declared, “I’m never leaving — they can bury me in the backyard!” We had moved three times in nine months — new state, new job, new friends — and finally purchased this aging glory after difficult short-term rentals. Dragging children, pets and possessions, it was surely one of the most stress-filled years of my life.

I’ve realized, as time marched by in this house, that I have never lived anywhere longer than five years before — never been planted. Divorce (my parents and my own) and seeking have conspired to keep me moving. I chased the idea of home into my thirties, not really sure what I was looking for.

So each year after five in this house has felt like a victory of sorts — a grounding, a settling, a rooting. I have, very slowly, begun to embrace this feeling that I didn’t know I needed — the feeling of belonging here, of place. It’s interesting how these buildings we call home can, and often do, embrace us back — teach us how to live, show us what’s important. It took almost ten years to unpack the last boxes — it felt like a constant project, something to be repaired, built, created. But now, after most of my adult life here, it is a living thing — it is active in the creating. There are voices in every room, memories in every corner.

I’m home.

My house was built in 1860, one year before the beginning of the Civil War in a region (upstate New York) that saw its sons march away. The residents woke each morning for five years wondering, I imagine, about war developments in their backyard. They looked out these same windows when Lee surrendered, and days later, when Lincoln was assassinated. I imagine the voices that have bounced off these walls where I drink my tea and where we now discuss the tragedies and triumphs of our current world and, more often, our tiny personal dramas.

The early occupants probably discussed post-emancipation politics and may have been aware of the Sioux wars taking place out west. They likely had opinions about the women’s suffrage movement, born in part just up the road in Seneca Falls. Did they talk about General Sherman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Booker T. Washington, Chief Joseph — in real time? Or was conversation more along the lines of planting and livestock, civic issues and the latest fashions?

They roamed these rooms when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876 (a distant novelty, I would imagine), Thomas Edison the lightbulb in 1879. And what must they have thought of the first Model T in 1904, these people with several hitching posts around the house to anchor the horses and carriages that carried them over the dirt road to town?

How attuned were they in 1898 to the Spanish American war and what did they think, if they heard of him at all, about the young Teddy Roosevelt and his ‘Rough Riders’ in Cuba? Did they argue, as we do regularly in these same rooms, about the courage, the folly, the madness, and the arrogance of those who make headlines?

On and on, I could march through history this way — imagining the perspective of those with front row seats to the great upheavals of the past. All the wars, the parade of personalities, the mind-bending innovations — how were the people in my house personally affected? They sat, possibly where I sit right now, and contemplated the drama of their own time. And I’m sure they also contemplated the aching back, the ominous weather, the dinner waiting to be built, the unruly people and animals around them — just as I’m doing right now.

This house has seen birth (my daughter was born in an upstairs bedroom and I’m sure there were many others) and, probably, death. Wedding marches and funeral dirges. It has seen wild, drunken revelry and mournful nights of woe, great triumphs and small disasters — saints and sinners, the clamor and chaos of a burgeoning culture. It has stood watch over booms and busts, comedies and tragedies but mostly, most likely, the small, quiet unfolding of human life, the tender tiny moments we tend to forget. Mornings and high noons, sunsets and midnights. Blizzards, heat waves, and gray days. Thousands of meals, cases of wine, a parade of humanity with their quirks and anxieties, their hopes and happinesses. Old men fussing with fires, old women stirring the pot, mothers and fathers arguing and cajoling, teenagers scheming and dreaming, children dashing about, raising dust in every room. And babies — always babies, the onward march of generations.

I wish I could hear them, see them, know something about them. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ve hoped to unearth clues — a diary, a letter, a newspaper clipping. Somewhere in the walls, in the attic, the basement, the yard — there must be something. This house definitely has her secrets — a creepy cistern, dark back stairs, the walled-off, hushed closet frozen in time with one lone hanger swinging from a rod. We can see it through a tiny hole in the inhospitable back stairs and I’m sure, if we ever rip a wall out, I would find something there.

The ghosts are here, I suppose, whether I believe or not.

My adult sons have taken to their patronizing mantra — “Ma, you really need to get out of the house …” . It’s an echo of my own sentiment about my own mother in the middle of her life. But what the young don’t often get is that, if you’re lucky, you’ll feel the same way some day.

I love my house. I love home. It’s my haven and my happiness — where we cook and sing, read and write, sleep and bathe, entertain friends and family, make love and even a little war.

And now it begins. The workers trickle in, swarm and disappear. Some of them lie and don’t return calls, don’t come when they’ve promised. The best of them are punctual, honest, hard-working and kind. I am giving them most of my money and have to trust that they know what they’re doing, because god knows we don’t.

The roofers appeared early one morning and re-roofed an out-building in a matter of hours. Now we have a leak and our calls go unanswered. The gutting and restoring of the teen’s bedroom was done by a friend (never again). The job took three times the estimate and still isn’t completed. We patched it up and painted and are now, a whole season later, thrilled with the results. “A week,” he said.

We’re on our way and, even with detours and roadblocks, it’s glorious. It feels like we’re saving a friend, tending the wounds of a loved one. We will have no more leaks, no more mold, a functional shower and — miracle of miracles — a beautiful, deep, pristine bath where we can soak away the stress.

Stalwart and silent she stands through it all, watching her occupants toil and fret, laugh and cry. Round and round go the days, the years, the generations. George Washington didn’t sleep here, but many have. We do.

It’s good to be home.