The Bones Are Good
House, home, and one decade of fixing up.
Dear friend,
I will be offline for most of next week, spending a few nights in the backcountry. While I hope to have a dispatch go out in the early part of the week, it is entirely possible that I will need to ask you to be a little patient with me. I am sure you understand, and will somehow survive.
I am enjoying working on the next part of my recent essay on elders, but it needs a little more time to percolate. While it does, I hope that you enjoy the below, some (possibly too sentimental) memories and reflections on living for a decade in our little fixer-upper in the Oregon woods.
What is the relationship between a house and a home? Complicated to be sure, and wonderful. Please read, and tell me what you think in the comments.
-Paul
This month marks ten years since Emily and I purchased our little white house in the Columbia River Gorge. Our youngest son was a one-month-old infant, our middle boy was two-and-a-half, and our eldest a girl of four. In the buying process, my best beloved and I had decided that for our mutual sanity a “fixer-upper” should be off the table. Could we do it? Yes. Should we? That was a separate question. (We are still asking it, which is not to my credit.)
We immediately dropped that pledge when, in the high summer of 2014, we saw the place that we would come to name Wakerobin House, after the hundreds of trilliums that bloom in the woods behind it. Built in 1930, its deshabille seemed romantic and slightly alluring. It had character. Of course that simply meant that the things we would direly need to fix had some mystique about them. We never uttered the phrase “move-in ready” again. We fell in love, half-feeling the whole time that we were going to regret it.
It was not the first time we had seen the house. That was a wonderful part of the whole problem. As if pulled from the chapter of some future memoir, Emily and I had walked the trail immediately behind the house many times, but especially on a particularly wonderful spring day in 2007. Wet with rain and beaming with her answer to a particular question I had just asked, we had looked down at its slate-gray roof the day that I had asked her to marry me. We had stood, looking out over the great river of the West, high on the slope immediately behind the place. We did not know, coming down with diamonds in our eyes (and a fine, clear one on her finger), that we were walking through the woods in which our children would, years later, run and shriek and gather berries and carnelians, build forts of fallen limbs, and hide and cry, and learn the names and ways of herbs. It felt like our place already, but we had no idea just how much it would become so.
And now there we were, under that gray roof, delighted and a little worried that we might have just come home.
The house itself tried its best to warn us off, but we bought it anyway. The “bones are good,” we told ourselves, because that’s the sort of thing you say to reassure yourself that you have not just made an enormous mistake. The bones are good, but why is the main bedroom gutted, and is that some sort of tar all over the floor? The bones are good, but there were skunks living under the floor until quite recently. Ha! The bones are good, but the kitchen’s sure not, and I’ll need to take a sledgehammer to the brick hearth, and I guess the wall above the tub does move just a little when I push on it. The bones are good, but it might be lightly haunted.
It did not help that the previous owner, a talented and well-regarded local artist, had filled the house and grounds with somewhat unsettling wax mannequins in various states of incompletion. They were intended to represent victims of 9/11. (The eyes!) Years later, we would still be finding splatters of wax in out-of-the-way places, particularly around light switches, which my amateur forensics would analyze. She must have had wax all over her hands when she flipped this switch up, based on the spray pattern.
But I digress. Yes, there were dead mice in the bedrooms. Sure, there might be rats in the walls. The feng shui was backwards. Still, we knew it from the first visit. In spite of it all, this would be home.
Our first four months as homeowners were spent in the most dire of the fixing-upping that we’d sworn we’d never do. Perhaps someday I’ll unearth all the pictures and share them, but not today. You’d see us in various sets of ragged and spackle-splattered outfits (and ten years younger), working through all the prepositions in relationship to the house. About, along, amid, among, against the house. In, on, under the house.
I would work on Central time, drive from the in-law’s place where we were crashing for those few months, and work until ten or eleven PM. When it was warm, I would drag a cot into the front yard, and sleep, exhausted, under the stars. The smell of fallen apples still will take me there.
My father-in-law spent hundreds of hours working alongside me, to the point where I almost started being the one working alongside him. My mother-in-law painted and cleaned. Friends and relatives of all kinds helped immensely, encoding themselves into the walls—this is the doorway Uncle David widened. This is the closet where Cousin Kristina picked up the dead mouse. I refinished the fir floors until they gleamed like warm honey. I learned the crawlspaces with horrid intimacy. The “Fawn Chapel,” an unaccountable hot-tub enclosure with a circular stained-glass window of a black-eyed deer (just why, people?) gave way to a beautiful office, mostly through the kindness and industry of Emily’s dad.
I finished things I never should have started. I started things that I still have not finished. I bled from each knuckle, smashed each digit. I swore at boards and prayed like a tent-meeting convert over projects I hoped I wouldn’t have to do. I thought through something for hours, only to make some unavoidable mistake based on not know what was really in that wall, or whatever. I lost a few brain cells from various fumes, learned how different the sawdust of the old wood smells from the sawdust of the new. Emily sweet-talked her way into a contractor’s discount down at Benjamin Moore, and the paint flowed abundantly and at a slightly reduced price. One by one, the rooms transformed into something not only livable, but in their way, lovely. We were part of them, and they were becoming part of us.
And the romance of it all slowly woke up. By December of that first year, enough rooms were finished to allow us to move in and celebrate Christmas there together for the first time, the five of us sleeping in the small upstairs as we continued to work. The woodstove glowed as the winter storms howled outside. We sat together for hours, by candle and firelight, looking for shapes in the embers like one looks for pictures in the clouds.
Just outside the kitchen, a bright creek laughed, descending through the goat-cropped pasture of a convent next door, to pass below old, gnarled lilacs and the low boughs of a cypress. It was all something from a song; something in an old photograph. The way the light fell when the sun declined over the Columbia, which we could see from the front yard, seemed to have some special quality to it, as if its very photons became thicker here somehow. You looked at your hand in that light, and it became eternal for a moment, the hand of a living statue, ennobled.
The front yard was home to great Pacific Sunset maple, a mature early planting of a locally-developed variety. On moving in, our daughter announced that the tree would be named “Arkor.” We never learned why, but so it was, and Arkor has been Arkor ever since. That’s how these things go.
The tree would mark the seasons for us with displays of exquisite color and texture. Winter’s bareness would reveal the lichens and mosses, beautiful in their way, which festooned the bark. Spring’s early sign was when the tree would send out little red pom-poms, whose function I have never quite been able to determine. Perhaps Dr. Seuss would have known—they look so much like something from The Lorax. They fall away quickly though, giving way to elegant, glossy leaves that bow and hold fast thorugh the spring storms and shade through high summer. And then Fall. We had never seen colors like this tree can make. It is the purples and the violets that are the most unique, striating through original greens and into the yellow, orange, and red registers, before adding a symphony of coffee-browns. For two short weeks, just about October, the very light goes out of its way to linger on the undersides of those leaves. And then, after the first night of heavy wind, we wake to find that Arkor has fallen asleep again.
And this brings us to the wind. The native tribes called this place the “home of the East Wind,” and so it is. The stone cliffs funnel roaring air from the high, cold plateaus east of the Cascades toward warm, low Portland and her valleys, and we sit in the way. When the leaves fall in winter, we stand in our front yard and watch the whitecaps on the Columbia. Hard winds—40, 50, 60 miles per hour—are common. Hundred-mile gusts are not impossible in the really whomping storms. The East Wind tosses anything left loose, moans and jokes and plays music on the rib-bones of the trees. Early on, when he would slam the outer doors, the kids would say one of their few Hungarian phrases: Nem, nem nem, Szélkirály. “No, no, no, Wind-king.”
To write of the storms alone would take a short book and new words. To write of all the weather would take a long one. Under the rain, and sun, and fire-ash, and wind, and cold, and snow, and dark, and light, our trees and garden grew. The grass grew. The moss grew. The mushrooms grew. We grew.
The years are passing. Already Arkor marks new seasons—the swing that was hung from him and once used daily is more quiet now. The children are larger. Soon it will hardly swing at all. Eventually—and far too soon—I will take it down and lay it somewhere like a leaf. The children who toddled one decade ago have filled the branches of the tree. They still may be found there, reading, eating, watching the road for guests. But they are heavier as they climb, and the branches are becoming less enchanted. And so it is with everything.
Thinking of it now, I wonder if the scenes we could barely discern in that fire were the scenes of our life in this house. So much happiness. So much real and indescribable pain, as the shape of those griefs which we were called to carry revealed their full dimensions. So much of the raw and lovely stuff of life.
Perhaps, if I had known what I was looking at in the flames, I would have been able to recognize our youngest as he learned to crawl and walk, as he feasted on old fruit off the ground like a bear. To see my daughter, cradling a broken arm after picking apples while walking on homemade stilts. To see my lovely wife and I, as in a flickering mirror, as our hair grew and grayed a little, now long, now short, now long again. The thousand moments spent in laughter or in tears. The million moments that I will not remember, because they were taken for granted as they passed unseen, which now I see were precious beyond description.
Perhaps I could have seen the Eagle Creek Fire, in 2017, which displaced us in a surreal tangle of memories—the ash falling in the shape of intact fir branches, the panicked snakes which poured up from the rocks as the fire neared. One “hundred year” storm, which packed snow clear up to the windowsills one absurd January. Our few human neighbors in this ghost town, who are a village of characters, people we all know and have come to trust and love through many stories. The convent of nuns, whose lives have become so woven with our own, whose graves we’ve dug and whose apples we’ve picked in the richest spirit of poor, dear St. Francis, and who our children have been privileged to count as a whole unforgettable house full of holy aunts and grandmothers. All around us, evidence of history, of mystery.
The books read; the books written. The lino blocks carved with razor-keen curved knives, and inked and printed. Emily’s art, exploding into powerful expression, filling the too-small rooms with canvases and painted panels. Legos everywhere. The toy drill set next to my real one. The dog that finds us and stays. Pumpkin pulp and beer wort and apple must. Dough and plum jam. Mr. Fluffy Pants the rooster, on his leash. Me doing snow angels shirtless in the dead of winter. My appendix trying to kill me. Tinctured roots. Nettle and mugwort hung to dry. Rain. More rain. Sun. More sun. Tears, laughs, tears, laughs. Barks. Laughs.
The firs and alders that fell below my Stihl chainsaw, trees which were rounded and split, bleeding golden sap, then seasoned, then burned, in thousands of fires. The trees we planted in their place: cherries and plums, pears and apples, lilacs and laurels. The roses, from David Austin, which became the traditional birthday gift from Emily to me. The herbs, wild and domestic, the dahlias. All a riot of life, all a glorious, messy tangle, which we have been barely able to steer, let alone make presentable. All part of “home” for us. But only because of this house. This all became our story because this became our place. It would have been another story in another place. We would have become other people in another place.
And this itself, an image of the true crop, the true project. For this has been the soil that our souls have grown in, and the souls of our children. To tell those stories would take many books, and much of them are still not written. But how many sweet memories, and how much happiness. Many have been the moments that I have turned to my daughter, to say “we are right now living in a chapter of our book,” which my father used to say to me when I was young, and have tried to capture, in my mind, the I will remember it just like this of it. Those were the best—no, those are the best.
Oh, those few, fragile minutes which you are allowed to feel as being fragile. You see them, only just as you are losing them. That is why you see them. That is why you can see anything. Because it it going. It is in time, and it is going. Going like the wind, or the water of the little creek. The fire is beautiful, and the pictures you see in it you see because it is dying. You see because it is passing away. The child’s face goes, right as you are learning to know it, to memorize it. Then they stand before you, and then beside you, comparing their height to yours, and you laugh, but the laughing sounds like the embers of a fire, roaring so high, but you know that it is eating you inside, and that though the wood of you is good, and there is so much left, it still will not last forever. It cannot last forever, not in the way you want it to. The new house ages. Blink, and all new people are inside it. Blink again.
The creek is the same creek, but the water is always different water. The wind is the same wind, but the air is always different air. The fire is the same, but the wood goes. The life is the same life, but the people are always different people, and right now, we are the people. And it is all so good. And it is all going, going on the place where the water goes, and the air goes, and the fire goes. Going, somehow, home.
“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” said Sir Winston Churchill in 1943 to the House of Lords. He is right. But some buildings, like people, seem to be shaped forever. For ten years I have shaped and been shaped, by the particularities and peculiarities of here. The ten years I’ve lived here is longer than I’ve lived consecutively in any other house in my life. For better and for worse, I am like a goldfish that has grown to fit his bowl. What a wonder.
What is the line between a house and a home? What is the connection between the hand that holds the hammer and the nail it strikes? Who can tell me what the house would have been without us? Who can tell me what we would have been without this house? Of all places, this place. Of all people, us.
I had great dreams of celebrating our ten years in this place with a party or something. As with many of my great dreams, that simply will not happen this year.
And so, I will have to imagine it. In my mind, it is August, just at sundown. The grass under my feet is brown and sleeping. There are lights strung through the trees, and the smell of ripening apples. From the dark forest comes the spiraling whistle of the thrush, and the shouts of rioting children in the branches, and there is music, and dancing, and so many flowers, and the people whom we love so much, who, like our moments, we take so much for granted until they are gone forever from us.
And in my mind, I see that we will be the memory here in the future, when, as such things go, some other people will come to guard and love this little bit of land, and perhaps eat the fruit of these dear trees, and wonder what the names are of the strange roses which I planted. They will find, perhaps, the old hatchet that I lost somewhere years ago, and little die-cast Hot Wheels cars abandoned to the soil by the boys, beside the 1890s bottles and the stone tools left long ago by native fishermen, which I have found, and stood and wondered at, while feeling quiet in my heart, and very small. They will stand in this creek, which is always new water and always just the same, and look at their hand in the light. And they will come to think, like I have come to think, of this place as home.
It is still wonky, “a house of insufficient hallways,” as my daughter terms it. We are always tripping over someone or something. It is so awkward, so wonderful. The paint I put down new is chipped and stained. The stairs are worn down to the wood where ten years of children’s feet have rubbed and stomped and tiptoed up them. The dog has scratched the doors; there are light grooves in the wood floors I refinished where my chair has slid back and forward by the dining table. Living means fixing, for ever and always. Only dead houses are free from it.
But we are here. It is pure gift, for all its many flaws. We saw it ten years back, and see it still. And someone else, I’m sure, will see it after us. I can at least pray that they too can experience so rich a blessing as that which we’ve recieved here. I can pray that for them as well, these bones will be good.
And maybe our bones will be good too.
What is the relationship between house and home for you?
Please share in the comments.
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.