A Love/Hate Relationship with a House

At one time, I had more rooms in my house than I knew what to do with. We had ten rooms if you count the scullery and the enclosed porch, but not the exterior porches (three down and an upstairs sleeping porch),

the bathrooms, the attic, the cellar, and the hallways which were big enough to rearrange the furniture that was in them when I had a better idea. Of course that house almost killed us, trying to heat it.

We had two gas furnaces, one up and one down, four fireplaces (two with woodstoves), and an outside wood furnace that took two pickup truck beds full of wood per week to keep going. And still we were cold.

I have a love/hate relationship with that house. I feel guilty for unloading it because it was incredibly beautiful with original details like bead-board on all the walls and ceilings (one of the reasons we couldn’t heat the place—I’m talking about individual slats of one-inch bead-board, not paneling),

unpainted woodwork,

windows with wavy glass, a built-in china cabinet with the original owner’s name penciled inside and the date—1904,

turn-of-the-century light fixtures, and fifty-three acres of land abundant with flowers and flowering trees like purple plum trees, ornamental cherries,

rhododendrons, azaleas, and hibiscus. There were also red bud trees, crepe myrtle, a weeping cherry, wisteria, and daffodils. There were cobblestone paths, gurgling creeks with hand-made bridges,

meadows and fields, barns, a cottage, and a carriage house that once was a rest stop for horses and buggies.

It was truly a beautiful place, more than anything I ever imagined having, and I continuously worked on it, feeling like I was saving it from the previous owners who had wrecked it. It took me two full years just to paint it. I couldn’t use a roller because of all the gaps in the bead-board and so I had to do it all by hand, including the ceilings. It took three coats of paint altogether because it had to be primed first. The ceilings were high, maybe another three feet or so higher than most standard ceilings, so that added to the painting, giving me more wall to cover and adding to the difficulty since I had to maneuver the ladder around. I finished painting it right about the time we sold it. Maybe it was the painting that almost killed me but I didn’t care because I loved that house and I worry about it because a house can so easily fall into the wrong hands and fall into disrepair and an old house, especially, needs constant attention and definitely constant painting.

I also feel guilty because I like the person I sold it to. I didn’t tell her about the Evils who lived next door. If you can call it next door. It was across the road, through the creek, and over the mountain if you went by four-wheeler or horseback. If you drove, it was three miles around. But it was the adjoining property nonetheless. The Evils were the previous owners who had wrecked it. Even though they were only there for a short time, perhaps they felt they had a claim to it forever, or maybe they just felt they had the right to ride roughshod over anyone in their path. At any rate, it was close enough for the Evils to stalk, harass, vandalize, rob, and assault me and my family. For what reason in their sick, demented minds, I really have no idea. The only thing I can come up with is they thought I called Animal Control on them. I hadn’t. But I was thinking about it. This was a bit of information I neglected to share with the person I sold the place to when I was telling her how lovely the purple plum trees looked when they were blooming.

I justified it by telling myself that I was going to die from the stress if I didn’t get out of there. I also told myself that the new owner—let’s call her Naomi—sort of deserved it because she tricked me into giving her the place for fifty grand less than I had planned to. Okay, forget “sort of.” There’s no “sort of.” If I’m going to be honest here, I wholeheartedly thought she deserved it, I was so mad that she scammed me on the price of the house. (Of course business is business and she was clever—I really can’t fault her for that.) I also thought that just because the Evils were attacking me, didn’t mean they would attack her, though I have to admit, if their record of fighting with everyone around town was any indication, it didn’t look good for the new owners.

But all’s well that ends well. Naomi was stronger than me and I think she was meant to be there (someday I will tell you the harp story) because she gave the Evils a run for their money and was instrumental in them finally getting arrested for animal abuse and it wasn’t long before they lost their house and hightailed it out of there, leaving the neighborhood the bucolic and peaceful place it once was.

(Ironically, they rented a place in the same county I had moved to and though I lived in fear of running into them, and did in fact see them in Walmart one time, which caused me to abandon my cart full of Great Value paper towels and Suave conditioner, I never saw them anywhere near my side of the county and so they had no idea where I lived.)

In addition, Naomi forgave me for selling her the place. When I finally came out with it, the story of what the Evils had done to us, and apologized for not telling her, she didn’t sue me, retaliate, or even get mad. We keep in touch. The Evils are gone and she got the place for a good price. Of course she’s freezing her ass off in there. But once the purple plum trees start blooming, she’ll forget all about that.

Transformations

I decided to finally use my nana’s glasses. I’d been carrying them around, from house to house, for thirty years. Thirty years! I didn’t want to break them. They were too sentimental to be mixed up with the I Love Horses mug and the cereal bowls in the sink. Also, I thought they were ugly. But they’ve somehow gotten beautiful, transforming themselves inside yellowed newspapers and a Pabst Blue Ribbon box, like a butterfly transforms itself inside a cocoon. Though they look exactly the same. Now I love them. Not only because they were hers, but because they’ve gotten old enough to be cool. I’m waiting to see Don holding one on Mad Men.

So now I’m looking around for what else is cool. I hate it when I suddenly remember something that at one time I thought was ugly, mostly out-of-style items that weren’t old enough, that I got rid of. I might have called these things “hideous.” Then I remember that I gave it away, or worse, threw it away, like the floor lamp with three cone-shaped metal shades perforated in an atomic starburst design to let the light shine through. I threw this cool piece into the garbage when we moved to Sturm Lane (our first house in Jackson) and were cleaning it out because it was an estate sale and it was full of junk.

We had to get a Dumpster, there was so much junk in the house. Mostly old stuff, so I was thrilled. It had been an old man’s summer home in the woods near the lake, a sort of Adirondacks in central Jersey, because that’s what Jackson was in the thirties up until the nineties (when suburban sprawl took over), Adirondack-like, mixed with chicken farms, and towards the end, horse farms. The kids (kids—they were senior citizens themselves at this point) sold the place with everything in it, picking out choice items they wanted, and perhaps fought over, like the oak barrister bookcase and a round table with paw feet, leaving us the rest.

I could kick myself for throwing out the floor lamp. And the old Westinghouse stove in the basement. But I kept the God Bless Our Home picture,

the maple bed, Bakelite silverware,

and the dining room table where Charlie Sturm, the old guy who lived next door and who was born in the house, got his tonsils taken out on the top of. That’s what they did in those days on the tops of tables between the bread baking and pie making—performed minor surgery like tooth extractions and tonsillectomies.

I started using the glasses because I stumbled upon them when I was unpacking and saw how beautiful they had become. I figured, what the hell? So what if I break a few? If I don’t use them, my daughters will be carrying them around in a Pabst Blue Ribbon box when I croak. Is that why I’m saving them? So they can save them?

I’ve already broken one. They are delicate. You have to be careful you don’t bang them into the side of the sink or clunk them into the faucet. They are not dishwasher safe. Forget putting them into the microwave because of the gold leaves. I’m not doing that again. I put one of my new antique china plates that have a thin gold band around the edge (I didn’t think it was real gold) into the microwave and the thing started sparking like crazy. Not that I have a reason to put a drinking glass into the microwave. But I wouldn’t try it if I did.

Kurt said, “A-huh,” when I told him that we were going to start using these glasses. He was skeptical that this was a good idea (due to their ugliness, not their fragility) until I said, “Don’t they remind you of something on Mad Men? Wouldn’t they be perfect for cocktails? This one is a rocks glass!” I held one up and turned it in the light.

Kurt endorses anything that supports the making of a good cocktail. He started thinking the glasses had become beautiful too.

I don’t know how I’m going to talk him into the puffy pictures I’ve been carrying around for twenty years.

The last time he saw them he said they were hideous. I used to think the same thing until last week, when I spotted them in the corner of the attic, they suddenly looked incredibly cool.

The Keeper of Things

My sister gives me all the junk that was our mother’s: blue and yellow bedspreads, clearly out of style; a pocketbook; brass butterflies; an old ironing board (I already have one but this one was our grandmother’s); the praying hands.

No explanation was needed for the praying hands. I knew what they were. Just like I know what the horn-of-plenty is, also white ceramic with a pearlized glaze, and the cutting board in the shape of a teapot that says, “Cookie’s Kitchen.” Things that have always been there. Things I always assumed everyone had—praying hands, a horn-of-plenty, a cutting board with their mother’s name on it…

She told me I was getting them. It wasn’t like she was bestowing upon me some valuable family heirloom. It was more like, whether I liked it or not. She’s a little bitch. She knew I’d take care of them, even though I am not religious, because they sat on my mother’s dresser for years, even though she was not religious. In fact, one time, she threw a crucifix into the garbage, that’s how not religious she was. It was a big one, about a foot tall, made out of oak with a ceramic Jesus attached to it. It used to hang over my parents’ bed until one day I spotted it in the garbage. Somehow it had gotten its arm broken and my mother didn’t want it anymore. But we couldn’t just throw it away! It was Jesus!

I rescued it from the trash and carefully put the arm back together again. The jagged pieces fit into each other, elbow into forearm, like a puzzle. You could hardly see the crack and if you didn’t bump it, it stayed. I carefully hung it back up. The next day it was in the garbage again. I pulled it out. My mother took it down off the wall, broken arm swinging, and dropped it back into the trash can. She said, exasperated, “Debi, it’s broke!”

She kept throwing it in the garbage. I kept digging it out. She hid it under the potato peels and wet newspaper, her passion about disposing it in such a disrespectful way proof that she was not passionate about religion and as soon as her back was turned, I dug it out again. She put it in, I took it out. Toward the end, I hid it in a shoebox. Though my dedication to saving it was no proof that I was religious. I just felt sorry for it.

Now it’s because these things were my mother’s.

I’m very sentimental about things. My sister knows this about me so I am an easy mark. She’s worse than my mother about throwing things out and so I know not to hesitate, not to question whether I have the room for something, not to suggest that she keep it because it will be out on the curb the next day if I even blink an eye. So she pawns off all the stuff on me. I am the keeper of things.

She even gives me her own crap. I knew she was angling to give me the old picture of a little boy that looks like her son for a few years now. Every time we passed it in her house, she said something about it. Isn’t it nice? Doesn’t it look like Michael? Like she was warming me up. Finally, somehow, I found myself the owner of it. I think she stuck it in with a bunch of other stuff that I actually wanted—the retro kitchen stool, the aluminum canisters, and the aluminum spice set that goes really nice in my kitchen with all the stainless I have in here. I had to take it. I took it even though I don’t have a wall to put it on and now I feel guilty because it’s not hanging up. But she has a load off. She knows I won’t throw it away. She knows I’ll find a spot for it.

She gave me a dented Thermos from the fifties that used to go in her retro kitchen in her old house, curtains that don’t fit any of my windows, gadgets that were my grandfather’s, a black milk can, and a stuffed chair that I had to make room for. She gave me the other half of the set of family silverware that I never knew she had (all these years I thought what I had was the whole set), photo albums, and dishes my mother once used for pudding.

And then the praying hands. They were in a box with a Bible. Not my mother’s Bible—I don’t think she even owned a Bible—but one with her name scrawled inside that the funeral home had included in our “package.” Even though she had never laid eyes on it, and I will never read it, I can’t get rid of it. Her name is inside.

Any day now, I will get the horn-of-plenty.

Since writing this, my sister has, in fact, given me the horn-of-plenty.

Thinking Outside The Box

I'm sorry I've been late. It's been hectic here. I don't even have time to blog right now but just to prove I'm still alive, I thought I'd post some pictures of what I'm doing to my bedroom. That's right, that wall is black. Black is shocking enough but for those of you who really know me and know how much I love old things, country things, and homey things, and light sunny colors, black is downright unorthodox.

The problem is, the bedroom was looking a little too "old lady." Once I put out all my antique clocks, lace doilies, and pictures of someone else's ancestors in round picture frames around the room, I knew I had to add a little modern. So this is what I am working on.

Pulling the Horse Trailer

I think I almost hit the horse trailer coming into the driveway. I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t see. It was dark. But it looked pretty close. It looked so close, in fact, that I cringed while waiting for the resulting scrape of wood post on metal. Luckily my entrance was of the soundless variety except for the slow crunch of tires on gravel and the horses whinnying to each other—You’re back! Hi! Welcome back! But it scared me.

I only thought I had to be scared going out. I exit out of the driveway onto the side road. Even though I got out the loppers before we left and cut off all the bushes that I could, widening the driveway by about a foot, it’s still pretty narrow and the street you turn on to, which I could do nothing about as far as widening, is just as bad. If I miscalculate, I’m in trouble. If I don’t turn wide enough, I’ll hit the hip of the trailer. If I turn too wide, I’ll go into the ditch. And I don’t know how to back up. It’s the reason why when the weather was iffy last month and we were supposed to go to a 4-H meeting on horseback (hence, requiring the trailer), I said, “I’m not going in this rain. I think I saw lightning. Yes, I definitely saw lightning!”

“It’s not even raining,” Kelly said, holding her hand up to the dry air. “And that was the neighbor’s headlights.”

You can’t pull the wool over her eyes. So I bribed her with the mall and then I distracted her by promising to take her to the tattoo parlor to get her cartilage pierced right after school on Monday. Hey, it’s not like I offered her a big sprawling tattoo of a skull-and-crossbones. Plus we were completely out of Victoria’s Secret underwear and Cinnabons.

The truth is, after twelve years, including trips back and forth from New Jersey to Oklahoma and Oklahoma to Virginia and then to New Jersey again, numerous times, I’m still no good with the horse trailer. It’s the backing. It’s tricky backing up a horse trailer. When you want the trailer to go left, you have to turn the steering wheel right. When you want it to go right, you turn the steering wheel left. It goes against everything I was taught. Point the nose and the back end will follow. I know, I know about the trick where you grip the steering wheel on the bottom, so that when you want to go right, your hand is actually moving to the right. But then I get even more balled up, as my mother would say. Top, bottom, left, right—where am I supposed to put my hand?! Wait, wait, I can’t think!

Throw the video screen in there that’s in the new dually, and I don’t even know where I should look. At the screen? Over my shoulder? In the side mirrors? But which side mirror? The left one or the right one, the whole mirror or that little miniature mirror that’s built into the whole mirror? Do I look ahead or should I just stop and get out and survey the situation before I go one more inch? My head is whipping all over the place like Linda Blair’s head on The Exorcist, my hand is going all over the place like the steering wheel is too hot to hold and the horse trailer is going all over the place—veering to the left, jackknifing to the right—and somehow I am getting more and more off course. Pretty soon, if this keeps up, I will have to call Kurt.

It’s embarrassing. I know I shouldn’t be embarrassed. No one who may be watching knows how long I’ve been pulling the trailer. As far as they know, this is my first trip out. I have nothing to be embarrassed about.

Kurt says just smile at one of the guys and he’ll help you. And that, in effect, is the whole problem. I’ve been smiling at the guys to get them to park my trailer for twelve years now, or letting Kurt drive (because he likes to drive and every time I think I should practice while he is with me, I’m too tired to insist and decide just to put my cowboy boots up on the dashboard and find a good country music channel instead) and so I’ve never really practiced.

Now I’m getting desperate. I’m thinking about letting Kelly do it. Of course, she doesn’t even have her license yet. But I’ve got a loophole. I heard there’s something called a “farmer’s license.” This is a special license for kids who aren’t old enough to get their real license yet but are needed on the farm to drive tractors and pickup trucks laden with blueberries or asparagus, a special permission for farm families who need all hands on deck, so to speak.

Or I can cowgirl up and just practice. And hang one of those Victoria’s Secret bras I got from the mall on the antenna. It couldn’t hurt.

A Man's Truck

There is a man’s truck in the driveway. It’s a big suped-up electric blue Chevy. It’s got some kind of thing on the hood like the engine is so big it’s busting out of it like a heart busting out of a lovesick cartoon character’s chest. I expect to hear it go boing!

The driver of this truck is one of the boys who is in hot pursuit of Kelly. This one is making some headway because she hasn’t allowed any of the others to come over. I like her taste in men. She picks the ones who are nice. This character (that’s what Kurt calls them—characters) brings her gifts. When she mentioned she liked Sour Patch Kids, he came to school the next day and brought her two packages of the candy. Two. I thought, this kid means business.

When she mentioned she liked Miranda Lambert, he got tickets for the concert and didn’t protest when I said I would drive them, even though he drives. He offered to put down my mulch. And he wouldn’t take any money for moving my stall mats.

But he’s a man! I look at that truck and think my baby’s growing up.

The Big Reveal

The house is peeking out behind the corner, ready, at any minute, to step out and show itself like a child in the leaves who has given up and jumps up—Here I am! I am right here! I was here the whole time!

Every day it reveals itself more and more. Daffodils are popping up everywhere.

Trees I thought were dead, are blooming. There are flowering trees and flowering bushes. We tie orange baling twine around the trees that have white flowers so we don’t inadvertently chop down a tree that flowers when it’s not, when it looks like every other scrubby sapling that has gotten out of hand and sprouted up where it shouldn’t because no one loved this place for so long.

I have a weeping cherry. I like saying I have things. Trees. Flowers. A garden. My tomatoes. My blackberry bushes. My crocuses are coming up. Like a person could really own these things that come up out of the earth on the whim of the sun and the rain or someone’s decision to get out a hose and start sprinkling. Like you could own a child. Even though it’s your child, you don’t own it any more than you own the bud on the oak tree. But I still have them. They are mine. Children. Trees. Flowers.

I didn’t know it was a weeping cherry right outside my kitchen window when we bought this place but that’s what I was hoping it was when I was having my coffee in the wintertime and I noticed the drooping branches and the bark that was similar to my cherry trees back in Virginia. And now there are pink blossoms, so I think I was right.

Another one in front of the window has white blossoms on it but I’m not sure what that one is. The one I thought was a lilac, is not. I’m not sure what it’s going to be.

Like the flowers, bricks and stones and slate are popping up in the grass. We walk back and forth so much from the barn and the driveway to the house that we wore down a path on the lawn. We knew that one day we would have to buy some concrete, or pavers, something, to make a walkway. It’s very hard trying to keep your shoes clean when you have to go somewhere when you’re walking across the grass. Try tiptoeing across the grass in high heels when it’s raining. Okay, that’s a lie. I haven’t worn high heels in years. But what if I wanted to?

One day I noticed a brick in the dirt. A little flash of red. First one. Then another. Then a whole section about one foot square. I told Kelly to cool out her horse there. There’s nothing better for wearing down a path than walking your horse back and forth. Might as well utilize this horse power!

It wasn’t long before there were so many bricks showing that Kelly couldn’t stand it anymore and so she got out the shovel and started digging.

She uncovered a beautiful brick walkway. Now we don’t have to build one! It was there the whole time! And a nice one! Nice old bricks. I think about Mr. Apple laying those bricks, and all those years they were buried, covered with dirt and grass for so long that no one even remembered that they were there.

We found the original well. It’s in the basement. I can see it through a big hole in the brick wall that leads to the crawl space. The only reason I noticed it was because I was chasing a bird and he flew in there. (Don’t ask; that’s another story.) It’s about the size of a hot tub and is made out of yellow bricks in a staggered pattern like the Yellow Brick Road. Someday I’ll crawl in there and look inside. Not the well. The crawlspace. Well, maybe the well if I see something glittering inside. Maybe that’s where the treasure is.

We also discovered two automatic waterers on the property. I’m assuming they’re automatic waterers. That’s what they look like they’d be. But I don’t know for sure since I’ve never seen an automatic waterer in real life. I’ve only heard about them like I’ve heard about Haflingers. I’d probably recognize a Haflinger if I ran across one but I have no first-hand knowledge.

There are two of these contraptions; one in one field and the other on the other side. We found them when we were clearing brush. One of them is covered by a fiberglass dome. In the basin on top there is plumbing. If you tip it over, there is a round hole in the ground filled with water like the hole the sump pump is in. The other one is a rusty metal box and we haven’t been able to budge it. The real estate agent never said anything about these and of course we were not allowed to speak to the seller until after the closing when the coast was clear, evidently to prevent him from blurting out something he shouldn’t and causing us to not want to buy the place. But this plan backfired because there is nothing he could have said about it that would have made us ask for our deposit back. Everything that was bad about it, we already knew. In fact, if we had been allowed to talk to him and learned about the automatic waterers, like how we later learned just how much of a horse community this is, we might have paid more for the house. Automatic waterers was a selling point the real estate agent never mentioned.

And a danger. Luckily we stumbled upon them before a horse broke his leg stepping into the hole, or worse, someone’s toddler visiting us fell down it. Since we have no idea what we’ve really got on our hands, though I’m sure it’s something good even though it’s obviously going to require some work to get it up and running again, this will have to wait until we have more time. In the meantime, no small children will be allowed to run around unsupervised. Small children tend to crawl under things and hide inside things so they can pop out and say, Here I am! I am right here! I was here the whole time! Just like neglected houses that begin to reveal themselves when they are loved.