A realtor named Merlee Harrison met my plane and took me to her house to spend the night. Early the next morning we had breakfast and set out to look for houses. We went into three or four uninspiring places and were beginning to despair. “Is there a Fay Jones house on the market?” I asked. “I know I can’t afford one but let’s look.”
“There is one,” she answered. “But it’s in terrible shape. I’d hate to even show it to you.”
“Show me. I want to see it.”
“Well, it’s on Mt. Sequoyah,” she said. “But not on the side you used to live on.”
All the way to the house she told me the reasons I shouldn’t buy it. It had been on the market for a long time. It was in terrible condition. The last owners had let three German shepherds live inside. They had carpeted the scored, concrete floors. The wood was in bad condition. I wasn’t going to like it. It would be too much for me to take care of.
We drove up in the driveway. A brilliant yellow forsythia bush lit up the path of the fallen fence. There was no garage or carport. One of the past owners had closed in the garage to make a guest room.
The huge yard was full of blooming spring bushes but it was overgrown and uncared for. The exterior of the house was unfinished redwood that was turning gray and black from mold. The screen doors were broken and half off their hinges.
“I told you,” Merlee said.
We went inside and I began to walk around the space. Windows everywhere, light everywhere, even though it was now falling on dust and spider webs and the really terrible stained carpet.
“How much do they want for it?” I asked.
“A hundred and forty,” she said. “They’ve come down twice.”
“Offer them a hundred and ten,” I said. “I can fix this place.”
Merlee kept shaking her head. “I can fix it,” I insisted. “I like all the windows. I like the room made out of the garage. I like the stone. I like the lot. I can fix it. I know I can. Make them an offer. Tell them it’s final. I don’t want to bargain.”
The owners accepted my offer. They had given up on the house and were building a new one out in the country.
“One proviso,” I told Merlee, who went to the closing for me. “They have to pull out all those carpets and take down every single thing that is nailed to any wall anywhere on the inside or outside of the house. Every flower pot, every barometer, flagpole holder, everything of any kind. I want a clean slate.”
A few months later I moved into the house. I lived in one bedroom until my furniture arrived from Jackson. Fay and Maurice Jennings had come out and inspected the damage and sent me a team of men to work on the interior wood. Tom January sent another team to work on the floors. Merlee found housekeepers to clean the windows and the walls. Day by day, week by week, it began to look like a house Fay Jones had designed and built. Most of all it began to be my house. I began to know it, to understand the amazing care with which it had been built. Fay visited me several times during the cleanup. “Italian stonemasons laid those stones,” he told me. “They used to sing work songs while they worked.”
To this day I can hear their songs when I walk onto the back patio and look at the amazing stone wall that supports the somewhat cracked but still strong and deep foundation.
I have owned the house since 1987. About ten years ago I began to have to paint parts of the house. I suffer from terrible mold allergies and the accumulated mold in the untreated redwood was making me so sick that my allergist, who had visited the house, said, “You have to move or die. This house is an allergist’s nightmare.”
The pond in the entranceway is walled with beautiful native stone. Ferns grow out of the stone. The pond was designed to catch ground water as that side of the house is dug into the north side of a hill. When it rained the stone wall was a waterfall. I kept the pond full of water treated with small amounts of chlorine and filled with tropical fish. The small ecosystem worked perfectly until my allergies became so terrible I couldn’t breathe and had to take asthma medicine.
I refused to sell the house and leave. The house is my home and I love it. So I sealed up the pond and got rid of the fish. I called a painting contractor and painted the mold-infested walls with mold-resistant paint. Later I was forced to paint the entire house. I could not afford to have all that wood treated by experts, so I did what I had to do to continue to live in the house.
I like the painted walls. I love the design and space of the house but I don’t like to live in dark brown rooms. I am unrepentant about painting the wood, although Fay Jones purists are mad at me for doing it. Fay built houses for people to live in. He loved my living in one of his houses and told me he didn’t mind my painting it if that was what I had to do.
Fay designed the house in 1957–59. It was finished in 1960. He built it for a G. E. engineer named N. F. Harmon who planned on living in it with his new wife. Unfortunately Mr. Harmon died soon after the house was completed and his wife was too sad to live in it alone so the house never had the owner for whom it was built. I think that explains things like much of the wood being unfinished.
The house has had six owners. I’m sure they all loved it as much as I love it and, like me, couldn’t afford to take care of it perfectly. I am charmed by the evidence of things previous owners did to solve the problems of living in a house built by a genius. The huge beautiful stone fireplace doesn’t draw well unless it has a very big fire going. Someone covered the entrance to the fireplace with an expensive glass cover. I bless them for having done that. When I bought the house there were thermometers everywhere, inside and out. After a few freezing winters, a flood from pipes breaking in the attic during an ice storm, and huge bills from the electric company I can understand the thermometers. I am on constant watch for winter problems. I leave the television on the weather channel, let faucets drip and have a plumbing company drain the house of water if I’m gone for any time. I moved the electric water heater out of the attic, had the heating system replaced and moved the collapsed ducts out of their concrete housing. Unfortunately the ducts had to be put in the ceilings where they are not as useful as they were on the floors. As I said I have done what I could afford to do in my wonderful house but it is not always what would have been the best idea.
When Fay and the G. E. engineer planned the house electricity was dirt cheap so the entire house is powered by electricity, including the dozens of light bulbs which were in the (at the time) very novel recessed lighting. Previous owners had run extension cords all over the house and through the walls in an attempt to add lighting with lamps that used less electricity and gave more light. After I bought the house I brought in an electrician who is also a Springdale fireman and he went crazy pulling extension cords out of walls and telling me how lucky I was that I wasn’t dead. I had waited until I got shocked trying to plug in a lamp before I called the electrician.
I have learned many things while restoring this house. Also, I understand Zen concepts. This house is pure Zen. For the first ten years I lived here I couldn’t get the roof to stop leaking. I had two inexpensive roofs put on the house and it still leaked. Finally, one spring I hired a man who seemed to understand the roof. He came out one morning with a truckload of Mexican workers, none of whom spoke English except the driver, who was crippled. When the workers hit a snag they would go get the driver. They would carry him to the worksite and confer with him. He would tell me what was happening. Then they would carry him back to the truck where he read and listened to the radio. The three days I spent with the Mexican workers were pure Zen. One of them was taking an English-as-a-second-language course from a friend of mine. Between his studies and my broken Spanish we had very nice conversations. I gave him advice about how to deal with his teenage daughter and he assured me that this time my roof would not leak. He was almost correct. The first time it rained there was a small flood in my office but the roofers came back out that afternoon and fixed it and it has never leaked again. In heavy rains I still walk around the house
checking the places where it used to leak but so far the Mexican magic is holding.
I have copies of the original blueprints of the house. I remember being in Fay’s office one morning and having Maurice Jennings walk in the door and hand me the blueprints. I had not asked for them. They were a surprise.
I love having the blueprints. I marvel at the details, knowing this wonderful house was once a vision Fay developed while standing on an undeveloped hill on Mt. Sequoyah. He sited the house on the north side of the hill, dug in to protect it from tornadoes, which come from the south in this area. I feel completely safe here in any weather. I had a wooden cover made for the only window in a room that was intended to be a garden room but has had many uses. When my son lived here it was a darkroom, now it houses the hot water heater that was once in the attic. It is also used to store the rugs I put on the floors in the winter. In summer I like the floors bare so I can see the precise way they were scored to guide the builders and carpenters, most of whom had never built a house with so many cabinets and so few walls. Fay taught a group of local carpenters how to build his houses. He told me he was on the site almost every day when my house was being built. Mr. Harmon was also there, directing the complicated electrical circuits for one of the first all-electric houses in the area.
There are many places in the house where I could take shelter from a tornado but the garden room is my first choice. If there are tornado warnings I put pillows and blankets on top of the stored rugs, add a battery operated radio and some crackers and bottled water and my cellular phone. I won’t need books as the cabinets in the room are already filled with books. Fay’s cabinets make excellent bookshelves.
Maurice and Fay were always so generous and kind to me about the house. I kept waiting for a bill but one never came. They even drew blueprints for screen doors to replace the ones that were broken. I had the doors made by a local woodworker and they are so lovely several friends have asked permission to copy them for their homes.
The house is beautiful and peaceful and Zen and the site on which it was built is perfect for the house. No matter how many floods or ice storms assault the house it dries out and stands strong. Someone told me the reason it is built of California redwood is that a local builder imported a warehouse full of redwood and when he went broke Fay bought it from him for a song. I was glad to hear that story whether or not it is true. I had always wondered why a young architect would import redwood when we live in a hardwood forest.
Every day I thank Fay (and the G. E. engineer) for the gift of this exciting, interesting home. Light is everywhere. The sun shines in the windows, it peeks in unexpectedly from a skylight over the fireplace, triangulates down across the stone entryway, delights me in any season. The moon shines in the glass windows over the pond, ferns sprout from nowhere in the stone wall. Everything is quiet and everything is a surprise.
There are so many stories to tell. The house was built to fit in between two hickory trees. The trees are huge now and produce many hickory nuts in August and September. The local squirrels adore the nuts. They swarm here to make huge messes of nut shells on the back patio and the front entranceway. One year they stashed hundreds of nuts in the overhangs over the patio. It took two workmen days to uncover all the hiding places and remove the nuts and repair the wood.
Later that fall the angry squirrels began to chew the redwood trim off the house, both on the front and back of the house. I have since talked to many owners of wooden houses who have had the same problem in Fayetteville.
I called the game and fish commission and they sent a retired game and fish expert out to my house to trap the squirrels. It cost twenty dollars a squirrel to have them removed and relocated over a period of three years. Much trim was destroyed during that time but I got to become friends with Mr. Cecil Gibbs, a brilliant man who knows everything about the large and small animals of the Ozarks. He traps animals for the Walton family in Bentonville and holds records in the delta for the largest beavers trapped near rice fields. Several years ago he had a heart attack while hunting on a cold November day. He managed to drive himself to the hospital where his life was saved by a beautiful young woman who is one of my exercise buddies at the local health club. I consider this more proof of the totally Zen magic of my Fay Jones house.
It occurs to me, especially in cold weather, that I should sell the house and get a small apartment. Several times I have even gone so far as to call a realtor, but I can’t go through with it. I love this house. We have been through a lot together. The house is all on one floor. If I ever had to be in a wheelchair I could live here with no trouble. I’d just move through the house on wheels, waiting to see what was going to happen.
Last year I made it impossible to sell the house by building a covered lap pool in the backyard. The pool is to help me recover from back surgery so I can put off being in the wheelchair for many more years. I can’t leave now. I’m here to stay. I’m dug in. This is my home.
SEPTEMBER 3, 2009
My Paris and My Rome, Part III
SINCE I WROTE THAT LAST ESSAY I HAVE DONE AN EXCITING AND unexpected thing. I sold the large Fay Jones house that none of my family ever came to visit any more because they have too many children to drive six hundred miles to see me when they can wait until I’m in Ocean Springs and come to the beach.
I made up my mind to sell it, called the toughest, best realtor in town, painted and fixed anything that was broken and sold it in a week for the price I asked for it.
My dream came true. I sold it to a doctor and his wife who have the money and time to rebuild it to suit the contemporary world. The doctor had lived in Fayetteville while he did his residency in general medicine, then moved to Alaska for seventeen years. When he and his wife were here they had lived near Mt. Sequoyah and dreamed of owning a Fay Jones house. They flew here for two days to search for a house; he was moving here to teach medicine in our new medical school. They walked in my house one morning and bought it that afternoon.
Then I went out with the realtor and found a wonderful brick condominium in a new neighborhood with children and teenagers and people walking their dogs in the morning and all sorts of things I like because I’m a small-town girl and don’t need to live on two acres of land in a house that has to be worshipped and served.
I had heard about downsizing and now I have done it. My new place is clean and new and pretty and has a garage with a door that opens at the touch of a button and a huge attic where I can store my papers and first editions of my books (for my grandchildren).
I loved my old neighborhood and my neighbors and will always love them but my new neighborhood is young and full of life and four minutes from the Fayetteville Athletic Club and three minutes from the mall and four minutes from the hospital and all my doctors’ offices. One of my old neighbors said, “You have moved to your mothership.”
The best thing was giving away recliners and refrigerators and beds to young people who needed them and came and carried them away.
The most difficult thing was trying to find a way to send a Chickering baby grand piano to Mobile, Alabama, to one of my greatgrandchildren who has recently started taking piano lessons. I had almost decided to go on and crowd it into the small kitchen of my new condo but it would have cost as much money to move it across town as it would to get it to Mobile.
A wealthy friend saved me. For a gift she sent her family’s movers to pick it up and take it to the little boy I call MK2. She was tired of hearing me worry about it.
There was a wonderful scene the morning after I moved out of the Fay Jones house. The people who bought the house had asked me to keep on living in the house for five weeks to take care of it until they arrived on August 15, 2013. I moved out, in a terrible rainstorm, on August 14. (Managing somehow to throw away or lose a large doubled grocery bag which contained all my checkbooks to four bank accounts and my Merrill Lynch account which made the first week of my new life a hurried and interesting time closing all the bank accounts and ope
ning new ones and learning that a branch of my bank was one mile from my new place with a great coffee bar, wonderful vice presidents and more new friends. Also, I memorized the new bank account numbers to prove that I don’t have to go to an old folks home yet.)
Rain or no rain a company called Two Men and a Truck, two Mexican women and I managed to move everything except the piano from the Fay Jones house into the newly painted and floored condo and by six o’clock I was unpacking boxes. It was not until late the next morning that I realized the grocery sack with my financial life was absolutely, positively lost or thrown away. No checks on the cancelled accounts were ever presented to any of the banks so I think the checkbooks are out in the Tontitown landfill underneath whatever else the good people of Fayetteville threw away that Thursday.
Early on the morning of August 15 I took three cleaning ladies over to the Fay Jones house to clean it up for the new owners and to meet the movers who were coming to take apart and send the Chickering baby grand to Mobile.
We got there about seven-thirty in the morning and while the movers were disassembling my precious old piano I wandered around the house deciding where the cleaning ladies should begin.
In my bedroom, where I had spent most of my nights for twenty-six years, I found the handsome doctor and his adorable wife sound asleep on the floor in sleeping bags. Their movers from Alaska had called them the day before, while they were driving two cars across the United States, stopping to see old friends and relatives and their children, having a leisurely drive to their new home and work, and told them they had to hurry to Fayetteville as their furniture would be there by noon on the fifteenth.
The doctor and his wife had driven like mad and gotten to the house about four in the morning. What wonderful, brave, adventurous new owners the house has now.
Things like the Truth Page 13