House Lessons
Page 1
Also by Erica Bauermeister
FICTION
The School of Essential Ingredients
Joy for Beginners
The Lost Art of Mixing
The Scent Keeper
NONFICTION
500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide
with Jesse Larsen and Holly Smith
Let’s Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great
Books for Readers 2–14
with Holly Smith
Copyright © 2020 by Erica Bauermeister
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
SASQUATCH BOOKS with colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC
Editor: Hannah Elnan
Production editor: Bridget Sweet
Book design by Anna Goldstein adapted for ebook
Illustrations: Elizabeth Person
Cover photograph: © Melanie Kintz / Stocksy United
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Ebook ISBN 9781632172457
Sasquatch Books
1904 Third Avenue, Suite 710
Seattle, WA 98101
SasquatchBooks.com
v5.4
a
For Ben
He who loves an old house never loves in vain.
—Isabel Fiske Conant
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Erica Bauermeister
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part I: Discovery
Falling in Love
Spirit of Place
Maintenance
The Four Rs
Part II: Digging Out
Trash
Architects and Builders
Plaster and Lath
The Hearth
Part III: Digging In
Foundation
Design
Roots
The Kitchen
Details
The Roof
Part IV: Domus
The Empty Nest
Leaving Home
The Writing Shed
The Dinner
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THERE IS A TRADITION IN straw-bale construction called a “truth window.” A small square is cut out of the plaster surface of the walls, exposing the straw within, so everyone will know what the house was made of. The square can be framed, covered in glass, and sometimes it even has a door—but it is always a snapshot of the construction process, a glimpse into the story of the building.
House Lessons is my truth window. As with any window, it can show only what the builder chooses to frame, the view he or she finds most intriguing. My story is therefore different than what my husband or children, or any of the many other people who were part of our renovation, would write. I leave those stories to them. Because I believe their lives are their own, I have also changed most of their names—and for the sake of narrative flow, I’ve occasionally conflated several characters or occurrences into one. This is a story, after all.
Come, look inside.
PROLOGUE
THE HOUSE STOOD AT the top of a hill, ensnarled in vegetation, looking out over the Victorian roofs of Port Townsend and beyond, to water and islands and clouds. It seemed to lean toward the view as if enchanted, although we later learned that had far more to do with neglect than magic. The once-elegant slopes of its hipped roof rolled and curled, green with moss. The tall, straight walls of its Foursquare design were camouflaged in salmon-pink asbestos shingles, the windows covered in grimy curtains or cardboard. Three discarded furnaces, four neon-yellow oil drums, an ancient camper shell, and a pair of rusted wheelbarrows lay scattered at odd angles across the overgrown grass as if caught in a game of large-appliance freeze tag.
The yard was Darwinian in its landscaping—an agglomeration of plants and trees, stuck in the ground and left to survive. Below the house, I could just see the tips of a possible orchard poking up through a roiling sea of ivy. In front, two weather-stunted palm trees flanked the walkway like a pair of tropical lawn jockeys gone lost, while a feral camellia bush had covered the porch and was heading for the second story. Someone had hacked away a rough opening for the front stairs, down which an assortment of rusted rakes and car mufflers and bags of fertilizer sprawled in lazy abandon. In their midst, seemingly oblivious to its setting, sat a rotting fruit basket, gift card still attached.
“That one,” my husband, Ben, said as he pointed to the house.
“It’s not for sale,” I noted.
“I know. But it should be, don’t you think?”
Our son and daughter, ten and thirteen, stared out the car windows slack-jawed.
“You’re kidding, right?” the kids asked. But I think they already knew the question was rhetorical.
Part I:
DISCOVERY
FALLING IN LOVE
Buyers are liars.
—Every real estate agent ever
WHEN I WAS YOUNG, my mother used to take all five of her kids on an annual quest for the family Christmas tree. We would travel around Los Angeles in our wood-paneled station wagon, from one lot of precut evergreens to another, searching for the perfect tree. As the trip dragged on, there were times I questioned my mother’s sanity, and yet when my mother found her tree it created a satisfaction within her that I could see even if I didn’t always understand. Maybe a particular height reminded her of being a child herself; perhaps a certain shade of green reached into her soul. I never really knew, and perhaps knowing was never the point. When I would ask what she was looking for, my mother would just smile and say: “It has to talk to me.”
Any honest real estate agent will tell you that most home buyers’ decisions are no more rational than my mother’s with her tree. There was a time in my life, years after I first encountered that ramshackle house in Port Townsend, when I was an agent myself, walking buyers through the process and dutifully helping them draw up their lists of requirements. I would listen to a couple emphatically assert that they needed four bedrooms, two baths, and a no-maintenance yard—and then watch as they fell in love with a tiny garden-becalmed cottage that they spotted on the way to the house that met every one of their specifications. It happened over and over and over. While we might like to believe that our house needs are pragmatic line items, our true needs, the ones that drive our decisions, come far more often from some deep and unacknowledged wellspring of memories and desires.
Because here’s the thing—we aren’t looking for a house; we’re looking for a home. A house can supply you with a place to sleep, to cook, to store your car. A home fits your soul. In ancient Rome, the term domus, from which we get the word domicile, meant both people and place, an unspoken relationship that we feel like a heartbeat. A home fulfills needs you didn’t know you had, so it is no wonder that when pressed for an explanation for our choices we give reasons that make no sense, pointing to a bunch of dried lavender hanging in the kitchen, a porch swing, the blue of a front door—almost always things that could be re-created in a house that fits the list. But sense is not the point. These small details are simply visual indicators of an architectural personality that fits our own, that reminds us of a childhood home, or a house, filled with color and the laughter of children, that we visited on a vacation in Mexico.
And yet a choice of a home is not just about where we’ve been or what we remember; it’s also about who we want
to be. As Winston Churchill famously said: “We shape our buildings and afterwards they shape us.” When we choose a house, we are making a decision about how we will live. I don’t mean in the obvious way of how long your commute to work will be, or whether there are schools or stores or friends nearby—although all of those things are important and will impact your life. What I am talking about is something far more subliminal. The designs of our homes quite literally change us. An eating nook for two invites a busy couple to slow down every morning for coffee. A courtyard in an apartment building helps create community. A south-facing window encourages optimism, while alcoves foster book lovers. Perhaps one of the strongest blows for feminism came from the first sledgehammer that opened a kitchen to a family room and changed the view of the cook, from both sides of the wall.
It is the rare buyer who sees these things for what they are. We are understandably distracted by the stress of what is for many of us the biggest financial decision of our lives. Our minds are busy. But we feel those subtle calls. We see that bunch of lavender. And as often as not, we leap.
* * *
—
THEY ARE GLORIOUS THINGS, these leaps into love. We catch the wind of our own enthusiasm, and off we go, into the sky of a new future. But are they really as untethered as they seem? In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks about our instantaneous decisions—flashes of insight he says are messages from the adaptive unconscious, the part of the brain that sifts through the bits and pieces of what is before us, focusing in on what is truly important. The process, Gladwell assures us, is a rational one; it simply “moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision making that we usually associate with ‘thinking.’” We meet a stranger and experience an instant aversion or affection. We walk in a front door for the first time and feel at home.
It’s not just our minds that make these decisions, however. We live in bodies with five senses, and the stimuli they receive from our external environments have a far greater effect upon our thinking than we know. It doesn’t take much to tip our decision-making scales, either. In one study, something as simple as the weight of a clipboard affected subjects’ opinions of the professionalism and intellect of the otherwise equally qualified candidates they were interviewing. The heavier the board in the subjects’ hands, the more likely they would be to hire the candidate. Our physical senses are busy little puppeteers, playing with the strings of our emotions. So watch out for the pleasurable feel beneath your fingers of that smooth door handle, the satisfying click of the latch as it closes tight and secure. From such seemingly innocuous interactions are big decisions made.
It can be hard to accept that our choices are being swayed by our senses, or that there is a hidden part of our brain that knows our needs better than we do ourselves. And yet what would be wrong with a moment of unconscious communication between house and human—the kind that allows for that back-of-the-mind sorting of memories and desires, along with the equally unspoken delight our senses take in a curving front path or a kitchen that smells like home? It is the totality of each of us that will live in the house, after all.
And thus, if we leap, perhaps it is with a greater safety net than we thought—flying toward a house that calls us by a name we have long forgotten, or simply need to grow into.
* * *
—
STUDIES—AND NOVELS AND POETRY, and general common sense—tell us that we are inclined to make leaps into love during periods of transition. One is more often propelled to jump when the ground is already shaking beneath one’s feet. My husband’s and my desire for a dilapidated house fit that behavior pattern rather too well.
When we found the house in Port Townsend, our family of four had recently returned to Seattle after a two-year relocation to Bergamo, Italy. Living in Bergamo had been a form of time travel. The kids were seven and ten years old when we landed in the small walled town, a fairy tale of cobblestones and bell towers. Stone buildings hugged the narrow, winding streets, and as we walked among them we inhaled the smell of slow-cooking sauces coming from homes that families had owned for generations. Stores were closed on Sundays, when families gathered together. Every once in a while, we were invited to a Sunday lunch, afternoons that turned into evenings while conversation and time unfurled.
We’d come from a world of high-tech start-ups, of dinners made from boxes and often eaten without Ben, who worked late. We believed in independence and self-sufficiency, in changing things we did not like, the sooner, the better. We’d lived light on our feet, thousands of miles away from either of our extended families. We had chosen that life every step of the way. We loved the speed and efficiency of it. We were impressed at how much you could get done.
During those two years in Italy, however, we changed. We slowed, looked around. And I realized that, more than anything else, I wanted the roots I saw in the people who surrounded us, the kind that settled deep into your heart.
But I’d learned, too, that we could never have them there. The people I met in Bergamo inhabited their town with a seamlessness that was breathtaking. They were its geography, its topography. There was no chance that we Americans, living there for only a short time, could ever put down roots among their ancient cobblestones.
So when the US company Ben worked for shut down its Bergamo office and sent us home, my feelings were mixed. That Italian way of life had sunk into us. We’d learned how to breathe air rich with tradition. On the other hand, I knew our only hope to get the kind of roots we wanted was, ironically, to leave, to go back to Seattle where we had a house and friends. It was a risky proposition, however.
“How long before we revert?” I asked Ben as we sat on the plane heading home. How long before we lost the delicious slowness of unencumbered Sundays?
“Six months?” he guessed.
It had taken two.
* * *
—
IN BERGAMO, WE HAD lived in a small sun-drenched apartment where the ten-foot-tall windows of the living room functioned like a magnet for humans. In that bright, open room, there was always a jigsaw puzzle in the process of completion; homework and language lessons were done there, as well, at the same table where we ate our meals. The space was an invitation to gather, a domestic equivalent of the piazza that lay in the center of the old town. Life happened there.
Whether it was that living room, or the fact that Ben was home for dinner every night, I couldn’t say—but during that time we became a family in a way we’d never been before. We’d always loved each other, but it had been as a team facing the world together, looking out. As we lingered in that room, we looked toward each other, and the difference was marked.
We’d returned to Seattle—to busy lives and our Craftsman bungalow with its labyrinthine layout and a north-facing living room that sunlight never reached. I watched as our family broke into individuals who raced off to bedrooms and offices, and I missed not just the country we had left behind but, even more importantly, who we had been there. I looked longingly at real estate listings on the pastoral islands that dotted nearby Puget Sound. I envisioned a life lived slower, a house that would bring us together again.
“I want to sell the house,” I told Ben.
“But we just moved home,” he said.
There is a difference between logic and knowledge sometimes, and it defies articulation. I whirled in that house, unable to explain what I felt.
I tried making changes. I got the fireplace working again in the living room to add warmth and light to its dark space. I cooked all the time—pasta sauces, cookies—using smells to lure my children into the kitchen, the one truly communal part of our house. When my daughter, a newly minted American teenager, would call after school saying she wouldn’t be home for dinner, I learned to pause.
“That’s too bad,” I’d say, letting the words drift toward her. “I cooked.”
“What’d you make?” she’d ask. I could almost feel the hook catch.
And she would come home, often with friends. But it wasn’t enough. I could feel us slipping from each other, losing our centers. Ben’s working hours were lengthening again, while Kate’s role models seemed limited solely to Britney Spears. Ten-year-old Ry was having a hard time reacculturating, boiling pasta every morning and packing it in a Tupperware container for his school lunch. I felt lost, back in a country where stay-at-home mothering was viewed less as a choice than an inability to do anything else—and I was failing even at that. I would walk through the deserted living room, up the stairs, and past my children’s closed bedroom doors, and the restlessness would begin again.
“How about we look for a piece of land?” Ben suggested one day, in the spirit of diversion and compromise. “Something we can build on later, after the kids are gone?” And that was how it started.
* * *
—
LIKE MOST PIONEERS IN search of cheap acreage, we headed west. In our case, that meant toward the Olympic Peninsula, a huge swath of land on the far side of Puget Sound, a place with more trees than people. We spent Sundays driving from peaks to valleys, but we always seemed to end up in Port Townsend, a small Victorian seaport that clings to the northeast corner of the peninsula like some exquisite limpet. We said we went there because we were rewarding our children’s patience with pizza, but there was something about the rhythm of that town. We walked among the century-old brick buildings of its waterfront, and time slowed to a speed we’d been in danger of forgetting. Gradually, the plan for land changed into the vision of a small and inexpensive cottage in town that we could rent out, covering our costs until the time when Ben and I could retire there. Something turnkey, simple, easy. A smart investment.
“Let’s just drive around,” Ben said.
And that, of course, is how we ended up with a four-bedroom wreck of a house.