I take a speculative walk around the house on a Sunday to gain a sense of the past. I’m amazed at the ability of the land and home to hold record of my work and of old work that came before my own.
Our house stands on a quiet street in the city. I suppose a realtor would consider it the kind of location that increases the resale value of your property: a good investment. It's a nice neighborhood if that's what they mean. The houses around it are all different and some are quite unique perhaps even quaint which tells of a time on the outskirts of town when the homo police (That’s short for homogenous) didn’t tell you what you should like in architecture and color. Ours is quite boring in comparison and would probably pass the homo gauntlet easily. It’s square with a white exterior, a one car garage and green carpeted front steps with, to my great chagrin, no front porch. Two, fifty year old trees, a maple and a locust, dominate the front yard. These are our coup de grace, planted quickly after the house was built in 1952. We’re only the second owners. There is a certain level of awe associated with that statement. The rarity of it becomes apparent almost immediately whenever I mention it. Reaction spans the spectrum from, "Wow that’s amazing and only a stud could live up to that kind of Wendellianism," to, "Ever heard of capital gains bitch."
When I work on this house I see the work of Mr. Baide and the men who, in 1952, built my home. They are most of them probably dead now. I tip my hat to them, the builders. It's a well made house. I hope they took pride in it.
Mr. Baide was a gardener not a builder and most assuredly not an electrician. The unfinished basement was his tinkering area for fifty years and when I took over ownership it resembled the Minotaur's maze: a dark labyrinth of wood paneling, multipurpose floor drains, dead end storage nooks, molding toilets and concrete walls. Sara and I moved in with just us and as we added to our family boy after boy, I forayed deeper into the dark abyss below us to claim square footage for the motherland. While there I found extension cord wiring, large electrical junction balls of black tape that blew holes in linesman pliers that only looked at them, washing machine floor drains that backed up into tunnel tsunamis, shower pans caulked to the concrete, and the list goes on. These were, in a manner of speaking, palimpsests as Wendell names them. They are the foibles and misanthropic madness's of the owning man.
In the soil, Mr. Baides genius shown. We've done a good share of killing on our land - all 8000 square feet of it. When we moved in, there were six long rows of massive raspberry bushes in the back yard. They gave buckets of berries our first summer. There was a wild flower garden by the shop that just grew thousands of flowers without us touching it. They'd come up in droves. We bought in March and by the end of May we were in an edenic paradise. And then the weeds moved in. All the flower beds were bare soil and the weeds flourished. I'd spend hours pulling the little bastards till one day I got fed up and mowed it all down.
That's a hard confession. I regret it to this day. It wasn't very Berry but it was also eight years ago and what the hell did I know. I miss those raspberries. I miss those free flowers that came around all summer long for nothing with no planning. Ours was a wilder garden. The flowers are gone and the berries but there are still remnants of the past. Every year the tulips come back in the front with big yellow bulbs. Horseradish grows wild on the side of the house and poppies come back like weeds around the lilac. The peonies and roses all bloom despite my contemptible displays of husbandship and the virginia creeper attempts each year to take more of it all for itself. These are none of them mine. They are the palimpsest of our land. They mark the passing of the man who planted and husbanded before I. They are the reminders of a fifty year relationship of a newspaper printing machine mechanic and his dirt.
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