By slow degrees, seizing the present
The body sometimes outlasts the mind. The legs may continue to bear forth, but a simple stroll can become "wandering" and a cause for concern.
We bought a house a year ago after its occupant took to wandering along the roads. We didn't know her, but we've since learned that one day she was found lying beside a guardrail. She was scooped up and eventually admitted into a nursing home. Her daughter, who lives out of town, put the house on the market. That's where we enter the story. ...
The house was a simple Cape that reeked of cigarettes, mold and a backdraft of home heating oil and burnt hotdogs. Nearly everything that was intended to be flat -- the wallpaper, the linoleum, the floorboards, the foundation, and countertops -- had since buckled like the dead leaves of autumn. Living in such a place would drive me into compulsive handwashing.
Her husband had died years before. Their kids had scattered. Everything I know about the father I've drawn from the evidence left behind. I suspect he was a handyman who turned into a hoarder, and the line between storing and littering became too thin to discern. Or maybe storing became littering in the same way that strolling becomes wandering.
We fished horse tack from a barrel of petroleum muck. We found an old buggy whip and a rabbit cage in the weeds. A pasture where farm animals once grazed was still demarcated by neatly set electric farm fencing, but the pasture had since become a dumping ground for tires, car parts and appliances all scattered down the slope and into the fern-furred swamp.
You get the point.
We've walked among all this -- the house, the acreage -- attempting to focus on what it all will become rather than on what it is and what it once was. But that's been difficult because for now, the three are fixed together into a mystifying trinity that can't be teased apart. It's impossible not to wonder what happened here. Were happy Christmases ever celebrated? Did anyone ever get a new bicycle? Was there love?
Clearly, the land had been worked for years. But what was the exchange for the great effort? A twisted turnip? Scuffed knuckles? Sore joints? Increasingly odd behavior? Wheels slipping off rims? Machinery coming to a standstill? Nails and screws and washers stored in mayonnaise jars whose lids could no longer be opened without something shattering?
Why was a crowbar left on the roof? Will this property's mulish, multicoated past resist our optimistic new paint-thinners? Even the little river that runs through the property curves like a question mark.
Someday when my wife and I are dead and gone, will some young couple with a child stand among the evidence of our lives, scratch their heads and wonder what the hell had happened here?
That's not the plan. The plan has been to make that house disappear, to build a house in its place, to restore the land to a small farm, to fold the whole shebang into a 30-year mortgage, to pay it off before we die, and to give this to our son as his inheritance. All the while, we'll surely celebrate Christmases and birthdays, laugh, love, savor homegrown food, and try to restrain ourselves from shoving refrigerators down the hillside.
We see the land for its beauty. But I sense its previous occupants experienced it as something that gave but only by force. I see our future there as something of an adventure. But I sense its previous occupants lived the sort of life from which generations of condo dwellers in Florida successfully escaped.
In April, we torched the house. We filled its rooms with hay bales and scrap wood. As a member of the local fire department, I gave consent to have our fire company have its way with the place. Afterward, it took only three swipes of an excavator to knock it all down and eight Dumpsters to haul it away. Nothing but a hole and a few ceramic knickknacks were left behind.
The endeavor was both exhilarating and unsettling. And now it's taken three months to fill the hole with a shell of a house. We have thus staked our claim on a 32-by-24-foot piece of the property. The rest of it, so far, still belongs to the past, a brutal palette of things discarded or mislaid or abandoned.
For now, fresh-smelling lumber is being joined and brought to square. The clock has only just begun to tick in the history of a house whose occupants won't always be us. Really, I'm kind of appalled that people not yet born will someday stomp all over these floors of ours and stake their claim upon the place.
But that's a thought better left for another time. Or not. For now, I'm trying to get some plumbing in the place. For now, I'm trying to get us in by Christmas. For now I can't help but think about the previous occupants of this land -- the farmer and the wife.
If souls live on, I hope theirs are purposefully strolling now rather than aimlessly wandering.
I also hope they have the good sense to move on rather than move in.
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