Old House

When my wife was in Maryland recently, she drove by our old house in the country. I don’t know if I’d have been ready to manage that, but she’s tough.

This is a place I whined about missing for years after we left, mainly during awful storms of angst and rootlessness. When we did live there, I bitched too, but mainly because I had to fix things all the time as the 70-year-old farmhouse rotted down around us. That’s what old frame houses do in climates like that. Anyway, she reported that the next-door neighbors had added an entire new second floor to their ranch-style house, as well as a wrap-around screened porch. This has the effect of dwarfing our old dwelling, which my honey says “ought to be demolished.”

Strong words, considering we loved it so much. Or did we? I know I loved the land, and she had a perfect second-story office. But living in somebody else’s old box had a way of getting to me. No matter how much paint I slapped on the walls, there was always something ugly in the corner, on the basement stairs, above the cheap ceiling in the attic, and so on. If you’ve lived in a big old place, you know what I mean. In this case however, “cheap” kept coming up. The former owner had built a front porch, for instance, done the work himself you understand, and he wasn’t very smart: the floor joists were too far apart, the plywood he used was too thin, stuff like that.

There was cheap junk in evidence all over that house. The modern windows in the extended kitchen area were the cheapest ones from the lumberyard, the kind with the thin aluminum trim stapled on right where you could see. The plumbing was a dripping, clanging nightmare of variously sized pieces and materials, whatever was lying around at the time, I figured. In the back of the old garage I found a funnel & hose arrangement, obviously a jerry-rigged urinal, that emptied just outside. The owner was a drinker, and I’ll bet he spent a lot of time in that garage just to keep away from his mother, who lived next door. There was a cabinet on the wall and other evidence of that corner of the garage having been a little home away from home. During wet weather, it always smelled like piss.

(Before we bought the place, the guy had moved across the road and rented an even bigger farmhouse. I guess his mother was gone by then, and maybe he never had a wife. But you know what? Before we came into the picture, he died over there in that house. Locked inside he was, and had been for over a week, when a relative finally broke the door down.)

In any event, my wife concludes that the old place has gone to seed. You might say it’s reverted to its cultural origins now, if the large concrete birdbath painted turquoise in the front yard is any example. It’s probably also worth three times what we got for it in 2000, but who cares? We’re not there, we’re here now, and the old place is a pile of crap. It was crappy when we lived there, but we polished it, propped it up, and had some wonderful times. It also used up all my spare moments just holding it together. Being an artist while she went off to teach, I had a lot of those.

I guess the house’s current state of disrepair reflects the more normal state of the current owners’ lives. Either that, or it’s sinking into Delmarvan sociological hell. I could see that.

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5. We Didn’t Rent the Ranch House (Video)