What secret things do the walls know after observing a family for three generations?
Not long ago, I spent the day removing wall coverings down to the frame of the kitchen in Frank and Jenny’s farm house. My first blog refers to this house as a place of gathering. The kitchen gave welcome to guest, strangers, laborers, and family who over the years sat around an oak claw-foot table visiting while eating pancakes made of coarsely ground wheat and sunflower seeds, or bread and green onions from the garden; sipping on hot coffee or Postum. If only the layers of wall paper could recount the stories it had heard.
Mitzi and Miriam, two of my sisters, and their husbands bought the house from my cousin Zar who made the first grand effort to preserve it after a period of partial abandonment. Zar lived the house for about a decade, refinishing and propping up where necessary. Cold, lonely winters finally drove him from its creaky floors and drooping walls. Mitzi and Miriam collaborated to spruce it up a little. Miriam and her husband bowed out after a few years leaving it all to Mitzi and Dale.
Over the past year they decided that there was enough history and beauty left in the house to confront the forces of nature which were vigorously reclaiming the edifice. Sandstone footings had held the it above ground for a century, but not at a consistent level. Part of the house had settled below the adjoining grade compromising its wooden parts. Mitzi and Dale decided to lift the house and add a basement to restore the foundation. At the same time, they rearranged interior walls to add space for more suitable bedrooms and bathrooms. Through the whole process, they managed to preserve the basic skeleton of the house, but all plaster and other wall finishes had to go; along with any secrets, conversations, quarrels, and adorations they preserved in their fibers.
As I took pieces of molding off the door frames, I would hand them to Mitzi to decide if it should be saved to use again. The amount of work necessary to reuse would have been prohibitive, but the thought was alluring. Once a noble but innominate pine in a nearby forest, it had been given a second life and soul through careful working and shaping, then silently served its proprietors for another hundred years. If only there was a way to extract all it had witnessed; the first draw of a smoothing plane, cutting to length, nailing in place, the dozens of coats of paint. And then the comings and goings of each person who had rubbed their hands along its surface as they leaned against or passed through the door frame, leaving traces of themselves. I didn’t cast off these sacred materials frivolously, nor did Mitzi. We handled them with reverence, offering thoughts of gratitude to how they had served and brought joy to us and our ancestors.
The question to save, preserve, reuse, or discard is fraught with contradictions. The artifacts of our past are laced with memory and sentiment. Some of them have value; often less that we imagine. They represent resources, some becoming scarce. The reasons to keep things are legion. Our spaces, our garages, closets, basements, storage units overflow. Many a time I have reveled in finding an obscure piece of hardware that I had stowed away years ago for some unforeseen emergency. When the finding and the emergency coincide, it seems to justify the hording and maintaining of clutter. If I were to consider the amount of time spent cataloging, storing, and moving those items from one storage location to another, I would shutter in thinking of the inefficiency of the enterprise.
I resonated with this poem by Mary Oliver:
When I moved from one house to another there were many things I had no room
for. What does one do? I rented a storage space. And filled it. Years passed.
Occasionally I went there and looked in,
but nothing happened, not a single
twinge of the heart.
As I grew older the things I cared
about grew fewer, but were more
important. So one day I undid the lock
and called the trash man. He took
everything.
I felt like the little donkey when
his burden is finally lifted. Things!
Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful
fire! More room in your heart for love,
for the trees! For the birds who own
nothing-the reason they can fly.
I long to be free, to fly like a bird, but I also love to come home and peruse one of the thousand books in my library or go into my shop and use one of the hundreds of tools I have acquired to fix or build something. I am grateful that Mitzi and Dale are putting time and resources into preserving the old farm house. I am also grateful that they are able to release the pieces of that house that keep it tethered to the ground, so that it can fly and land in the hearts collecting story and experiences of another generation or two of its builder, Charles Brown, my great grandfather.
