“Eat it up,” my grandmother would say, carefully refolding wrapping paper along its creases — “wear it out, make it do … or do without.”
My grandmother always wanted to live in a chalet. I have faded snapshots from her honeymoon, my grandparents tramping through the Alps; my grandfather, balanced precariously on rocks, reaching out to pat a goat; my grandmother in clumsy boots, woolen stockings, and tweed knickers grinning into the camera. Perhaps she fell in love with Austrian architecture then. Or perhaps it was her close proximity to the Trapp buildings. But for whatever reason, my grandmother wished she could live in a chalet — but made do with the house that has, in one fashion or another, sat here for 225 years.
Two hundred twenty-five years this year, as near as I can trace it. The land, sold by none other than Ira Allen as part of the Allen brothers’ land speculations as “fertile,” when patently it is not, purchased by a distant ancestor gambling on a hillside and, for a short time, the little town of Mansfield. They hand-dug a well, rocked in the sides, built a little house, built a barn, cleared land and ringed their new fields with the rocks some careless glacier dropped in its wake.
Settling in for a fairly successful period of farming, questions of soil fertility aside. The big house rose up, graceful in its timber frame and rafters cut from the hillside above. At the time, it would have overlooked the two farms below, with an unimpeded view to the mountains and sky beyond.
For a while, the farm was successful enough to unchain its children from the land, educating them, sending them down to be lawyers and clerks in the port city of Boston. Then, as fertility declined, sending daughters to the mills of Leeds, sons to be soldiers, and farm tools to rust.
By 1950 the house had deteriorated to the point where half of it was simply torn down, beyond salvage, and the footprint reduced to the big house. The well, now doubtfully potable, was covered over, and water piped from a springhouse tucked high on the hill. Modern conveniences were installed too: a flush toilet on the second floor, an oil burner in the basement, and what, at the time, would have been modern windows across the front of the house. But by far the finest improvement was the covering over of the old clapboard with aluminum siding.
And so it has stayed, for half a century plus 10, the house my grandfather — if we can use the word rather loosely — restored. I can’t say the house has stood, for while it is upright, it has, over the decades, cracked, settled, sprung pockets of rot. Windows sport tape to keep cracked glass from falling free of the mullions, which in turn shed chunks of putty when the windows are opened, or the wind blows. Outlets freeze over, squeezing ice through the sockets to wrap around the plugs, inching frost up the cords. Mold has made an appearance, ominously seeping through plaster, and on the second floor a builder squints dubiously at a jagged crack in the ceiling.
“That is usually the sign of a cracked support beam,” he explains, pushing upward to feel the sag.
Contractors don’t smile benignly when they look the situation over. They scowl. They mutter. They make notes. And they all say the same thing — to save the house, we’d have to gut the house. And by the time we’re done gutting the house and putting it back together again, we still won’t have a modern, insulated, house. We will still have drafts; they’ll just be very expensive drafts. Because likely lurking under all that lovely aluminum siding is what my grandfather didn’t want to deal with in 1950 — lead paint.
My beloved old windows with their wavy glass and beautifully shaped mullions can be taken out, they can be restored — there’s a company in Vermont that does it. But such restoration is well beyond our means and, even with new glass and putty, the windows will still hemorrhage air in both directions.
Apparently my house doesn’t just breathe; it wheezes, gasps, gulps great draughts of cold air. The swirling breeze around my ankles as I type should probably have been a clue.
“This is where the sink was,” my grandmother told me, pointing to a stain in the floor, “before. …” and here she’d wave vaguely in the direction of the tiny kitchen which, when it was installed, must have seemed the epitome of modern convenience. Before the tiny kitchen, the chimney went through the center of the house, with a great iron cookstove feeding smoke into it. But, before that, the kitchen was in the little house, a great hearth with bricked ovens and iron hooks.
“We can,” the builder assures us, “save parts of the house.” The soft pine floors, cupped, gouged and honey gold, will come with us. Two beams can be salvaged. Perhaps the treads of the staircase, sturdier fir but the same clover-honey glow. The old doors with their iron clasps on the second floor, my claw-foot bathtub and possibly, if we can pull them free, some of the old windows, to make cold frames.
Is there a requiem for a house? Once it soared upward, naked and graceful in its frame, to be clothed in clapboard and settled into domesticity. It has looked out on changing seasons with ancient eyes for 100 years, its wavy glass a mirror to my own fading eyesight.
But now it shivers with cold, the deadly cancer of rot gnaws relentlessly at its core, and every now and then a snake slithers lazily into a room, a serpent breaching the walls of what was once a homely Eden. To everything there is a season, a time, and a purpose. And so it ends, this old house. It has fulfilled its purpose, measured its time, and, having done so, reached the end of its seasons.
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