Man, this is precious. About midway through I noticed the tears I was holding back—mostly from relating, definitely from happy, like deep happy. Ten years of home! Yes, pure gift, the work and sorrows alongside the joys. I was stung with remembrance, loss, things hoped for—home! Sigh. Thank you, Paul.
The relationship between house and home for me, not to sound cliche but just so real—love. Whether in tent or townhouse or forest cottage by the river, I’ve experienced each as home when I dwelt in love and experienced each as starkest loneliness when I couldn’t remember that was possible, in every place. I still forget sometimes. Your words roused memory today.
Blessings on your time in the backcountry, know your return will be looked for!
My gosh, Paul, what an amazing entry: moving, thoughtful, and (my favorite) deeply hilarious, a kind of Mr. and Mrs. Blandings Build Their Dream House for the 21st century. (Why are narratives about contending with stubborn houses always so intoxicating?) I had a great time, thanks.
I hope that between the two of you, one of you had the chance to re-create at least part of Myrna Loy’s immortal speech on color: “I want it to be a soft green, not as blue-green as a robin’s egg, but not as yellow-green as daffodil buds. Now, the only sample I could get is a little too yellow, but don’t let whoever does it go to the other extreme and get it too blue. It should just be a sort of grayish-yellow-green. Now, the dining room: I’d like yellow. Not just yellow: a very gay yellow. Something bright and sunshiny. I tell you, Mr. PeDelford, if you’ll send one of your men to the grocer for a pound of their best butter and match that exactly, you can't go wrong! Now, this is the paper we’re going to use in the hall. It’s flowered, but I don’t want the ceiling to match any of the colors of the flowers. There’s some little dots in the background, and it’s these dots I want you to match. Not the little greenish dot near the hollyhock leaf, but the little bluish dot between the rosebud and the delphinium blossom. Is that clear? Now, the kitchen is to be white. Not a cold, antiseptic hospital white. A little warmer, but still, not to suggest any other color but white. Now, for the powder room, I want you to match this thread, and don’t lose it. It's the only spool I have and I had an awful time finding it! As you can see, it’s practically an apple red: somewhere between a healthy winesap and an unripened Jonathan.”
They used that scene in a Benjamin Moore paint commercial in the early 1990s, and that may be the way I first encountered the film. Myrna really takes your breath away with her timing (as she so often did).
We built a home, surrounded by forest in Alaska. Log and chinking, log and chinking. Our three children were small and, for a bit, we all utilized an out-toilet on a box in the woods. They grew and we grew for decades, and all flew away to homes that will never be as cherished as that home had been. It was sold under false assumptions and demolished by the new owners. That was twenty years ago and I am alternately blessed by memories and stung by the trauma of losing that place in the Alaskan woods. We are now aging in an expensive rental in NE Vancouver, but there are forests nearby.
I have such fond memories of your home. From the first time you invited me out and we walked the grounds back to the falls and pet the sisters’ goats, to clearing brush with you next to Coopey Creek it’ll always have a place in my imagination as a truly blessed (not #blessed) place.
Beautiful, Paul. I know exactly where that house is. For years the Columbia River Gorge was my sanctuary. After bouncing around various homes in Bolivia as a missionary kid — and Texas, Florida, and Canada as a young man — the wind brought me to Hood River in the late 80s where I purchased a small bungalow on the Heights. Like a bowerbird I cleaned, renovated, and decorated. Nature took its course. My wife and I spent our honeymoon there. We eventually settled in BC, sold the bungalow, and bought a fixer-upper locally. Then the process you so wonderfully describe began. We’ve been in this home 31 years. Our kids have grown. Elderly relatives have passed on. Neighbors have moved in and out. Your words have lent poignancy to the moment and rekindled memories of the past. I would gladly read an entire book of such prose. Really well done.
This is beautiful! Your writing awakened an inward groan for my sleeping dreams to be fulfilled. I didn’t have the privilege of growing up in a stable household, I’ve moved more times than I can count on both hands.
And yet I hope. I wait for the day when I get to create a home, and when it comes I will remember your words, “The bones are good.”
Beautiful. I can imagine your place being somewhere out near Corbett on the way up to Larch mountain where we sometimes go to pick chanterelles and boletes.
I've been thinking how I remember things based on the homes I've lived in and how memory is tricky and dreamlike. Like how I had pictured for a long time that we lived in a particular apartment in southern California when the first moon landing happened. That we were watching it on TV there in that living room. I remembered it that way for many years until a few years back when they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of that event I realized that we couldn't have lived in that apartment because we didn't move to southern California until after my dad graduated from college a year later.
I'll often have dreams set in some of those previous homes, like the house in Aloha that we lived in for 20 years - it's been 14 years since we lived there. The dream usually goes something like we snuck back into that house and spent the night there and we have to leave before the current inhabitants return from vacation to find us... and sometimes we linger a little too long eating our breakfast and just about get caught, but sneak out the backdoor just in time and melt into the wooded area behind the house. Am I a ghost haunting that house?
Our house is a retired farm house, uprooted and relocated to the large lot on the west edge of the prairie village where we have now called it home for 24 years. It suits us, holds our memories of both joy and despair like a sacred trust. It is home because we do our deepest living here.
It is our central home place in the broader context of this northern prairie-land that has also become home as I learn its seasons and winds and sun and birds and trees and flowers. And it’s people.
I have been in my own house for four years, finally purchasing it for real this year. If ever there was a house built for me, it would have been this one, I think, although I've had some of my own adventures in repair and replacement over time, haha!
"We would have become other people in another place." You have captured this so beautifully. My parents sold the home they lived in for over 45 years, my childhood home, and at the time, my mother said to me, "It feels like it did when I left India for America." It had become home.
Man, this is precious. About midway through I noticed the tears I was holding back—mostly from relating, definitely from happy, like deep happy. Ten years of home! Yes, pure gift, the work and sorrows alongside the joys. I was stung with remembrance, loss, things hoped for—home! Sigh. Thank you, Paul.
The relationship between house and home for me, not to sound cliche but just so real—love. Whether in tent or townhouse or forest cottage by the river, I’ve experienced each as home when I dwelt in love and experienced each as starkest loneliness when I couldn’t remember that was possible, in every place. I still forget sometimes. Your words roused memory today.
Blessings on your time in the backcountry, know your return will be looked for!
My gosh, Paul, what an amazing entry: moving, thoughtful, and (my favorite) deeply hilarious, a kind of Mr. and Mrs. Blandings Build Their Dream House for the 21st century. (Why are narratives about contending with stubborn houses always so intoxicating?) I had a great time, thanks.
You're the definition of "too kind!" Fortunately we spent a lot less than Mr. Blandings, but we probably bled and cried a lot more!
I hope that between the two of you, one of you had the chance to re-create at least part of Myrna Loy’s immortal speech on color: “I want it to be a soft green, not as blue-green as a robin’s egg, but not as yellow-green as daffodil buds. Now, the only sample I could get is a little too yellow, but don’t let whoever does it go to the other extreme and get it too blue. It should just be a sort of grayish-yellow-green. Now, the dining room: I’d like yellow. Not just yellow: a very gay yellow. Something bright and sunshiny. I tell you, Mr. PeDelford, if you’ll send one of your men to the grocer for a pound of their best butter and match that exactly, you can't go wrong! Now, this is the paper we’re going to use in the hall. It’s flowered, but I don’t want the ceiling to match any of the colors of the flowers. There’s some little dots in the background, and it’s these dots I want you to match. Not the little greenish dot near the hollyhock leaf, but the little bluish dot between the rosebud and the delphinium blossom. Is that clear? Now, the kitchen is to be white. Not a cold, antiseptic hospital white. A little warmer, but still, not to suggest any other color but white. Now, for the powder room, I want you to match this thread, and don’t lose it. It's the only spool I have and I had an awful time finding it! As you can see, it’s practically an apple red: somewhere between a healthy winesap and an unripened Jonathan.”
Gonna memorize it just in case the situation arises! It is incredible! (Now we have to introduce the kids to this great film…)
They used that scene in a Benjamin Moore paint commercial in the early 1990s, and that may be the way I first encountered the film. Myrna really takes your breath away with her timing (as she so often did).
We built a home, surrounded by forest in Alaska. Log and chinking, log and chinking. Our three children were small and, for a bit, we all utilized an out-toilet on a box in the woods. They grew and we grew for decades, and all flew away to homes that will never be as cherished as that home had been. It was sold under false assumptions and demolished by the new owners. That was twenty years ago and I am alternately blessed by memories and stung by the trauma of losing that place in the Alaskan woods. We are now aging in an expensive rental in NE Vancouver, but there are forests nearby.
I have such fond memories of your home. From the first time you invited me out and we walked the grounds back to the falls and pet the sisters’ goats, to clearing brush with you next to Coopey Creek it’ll always have a place in my imagination as a truly blessed (not #blessed) place.
Beautiful, Paul. I know exactly where that house is. For years the Columbia River Gorge was my sanctuary. After bouncing around various homes in Bolivia as a missionary kid — and Texas, Florida, and Canada as a young man — the wind brought me to Hood River in the late 80s where I purchased a small bungalow on the Heights. Like a bowerbird I cleaned, renovated, and decorated. Nature took its course. My wife and I spent our honeymoon there. We eventually settled in BC, sold the bungalow, and bought a fixer-upper locally. Then the process you so wonderfully describe began. We’ve been in this home 31 years. Our kids have grown. Elderly relatives have passed on. Neighbors have moved in and out. Your words have lent poignancy to the moment and rekindled memories of the past. I would gladly read an entire book of such prose. Really well done.
This is beautiful! Your writing awakened an inward groan for my sleeping dreams to be fulfilled. I didn’t have the privilege of growing up in a stable household, I’ve moved more times than I can count on both hands.
And yet I hope. I wait for the day when I get to create a home, and when it comes I will remember your words, “The bones are good.”
Beautiful. I can imagine your place being somewhere out near Corbett on the way up to Larch mountain where we sometimes go to pick chanterelles and boletes.
I've been thinking how I remember things based on the homes I've lived in and how memory is tricky and dreamlike. Like how I had pictured for a long time that we lived in a particular apartment in southern California when the first moon landing happened. That we were watching it on TV there in that living room. I remembered it that way for many years until a few years back when they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of that event I realized that we couldn't have lived in that apartment because we didn't move to southern California until after my dad graduated from college a year later.
I'll often have dreams set in some of those previous homes, like the house in Aloha that we lived in for 20 years - it's been 14 years since we lived there. The dream usually goes something like we snuck back into that house and spent the night there and we have to leave before the current inhabitants return from vacation to find us... and sometimes we linger a little too long eating our breakfast and just about get caught, but sneak out the backdoor just in time and melt into the wooded area behind the house. Am I a ghost haunting that house?
Our house is a retired farm house, uprooted and relocated to the large lot on the west edge of the prairie village where we have now called it home for 24 years. It suits us, holds our memories of both joy and despair like a sacred trust. It is home because we do our deepest living here.
It is our central home place in the broader context of this northern prairie-land that has also become home as I learn its seasons and winds and sun and birds and trees and flowers. And it’s people.
Home has never been just a house to me.
So beautifully said!
Lovely, lovely, Paul!
I have been in my own house for four years, finally purchasing it for real this year. If ever there was a house built for me, it would have been this one, I think, although I've had some of my own adventures in repair and replacement over time, haha!
"We would have become other people in another place." You have captured this so beautifully. My parents sold the home they lived in for over 45 years, my childhood home, and at the time, my mother said to me, "It feels like it did when I left India for America." It had become home.