noble house

When we first bought the country house, and even before when we were just contemplating moving, I thought I could never leave my house, the one in the city. So much of my life happened there. I bought that house when I was between, between one marriage and the next, and I was just starting out on my life as an artist. I had already met my real husband when I moved in though we weren't yet living together.

It was a beautiful house in an old inner city neighborhood. An old house, nearly 100 years old on pier and beam but well kept up with it's little porch on the front, it's hardwood floors, it's 10' ceilings, it's diamond pattern double hung windows with weights, it's claw foot tub in one of the bathrooms and the single wide porcelain sink and tile counters in the kitchen, it's deep eaves that shaded us in the summer.

I bought it from the widow of the man whose father had built it way back when. During WWII, she had divided it up into a duplex straight down the middle, turning the one big bathroom into two and making the kitchen smaller in the process and adding another bedroom on the back of one half, off the kitchen. The utility room/mud room became the second kitchen of the smaller side. I had two back doors then. It had been converted back into a single dwelling by the time I bought it.

It had it's charm but it also had it's quirks. Like really old plumbing and really old electrical wiring. It was not uncommon to blow the breaker when I vacuumed if too many other things were on. Like the shiplap and molding that was so old and hard that you couldn't drive a nail into it without drilling a hole first. Like no closets except for a very small one in the most recently added bedroom off the kitchen and a storage closet also off the kitchen. And if you were in the back of the house on one side, you had to go all the way to the front of the house to get to the other side, unless you wanted to go out one back door and in through the other. Oh, and it was drafty in the winter with no insulation. We spent a lot of time huddled around the space heater.

Eventually we made our own changes, enclosing the small back porch to make a hall that connected the two halves of the house in the back. We took out the more modern tub in one bathroom and had it replaced with a tiled stand alone shower. We got rid of the the storage closet, making the boy's room a little bigger and giving him a way in that didn't include having to go through his sister's room. We laid insulation in the attic. We planted the magnolia tree in the front yard.

So much life. So many memories. We got married in that house. We raised our kids in that house. We made art in that house. It was our home and our studio. It sheltered us and our kids and sometimes our friends. We buried our pets there. We loved and fought there and fought for our love there. We welcomed our grandkids there, their other home. It was a sanctuary for all life, a no kill zone inside my fence.

Eventually, the kids grew up and made homes for themselves, the grandkids were growing up and making lives of their own that didn't revolve around us. The neighborhood we knew and loved was changing. And we, we were older and realized that if we were ever going to do something new, something different, now was the time to do it. So we cast about until we found the country house.

Pulling up my roots was a slow and painful process and set adrift we bounced back and forth for nearly three years. We sorted through all our stuff, took most, left some behind. Now when I go back, when we go back to do the fabrication on jobs, it's depressing. It only contains the left behind stuff and I see how run down the place had become, something that was well hidden when it was full of our life. The paint is stained and peeling inside and out; the wood floors, so beautiful when we moved in, are now worn and dirty. The cords holding the weights in the window frames have all rotted and the weights have fallen so that now the windows need to be propped open. The skirt on the outside of the house, removed when we had it leveled, was never replaced and shows the foundation on the piers. The plumbing is so clogged now in the kitchen it backs up quickly. And termites are slowly eating it up.

This once beautiful house that has stood for over a century is slowly crumbling, fallen into such disrepair. This house that sheltered us from storms and gave us refuge needed more care than we could give it.