Our House

We have compared it to:

— a bunkhouse for itinerant fruit-pickers in 1932
— a communal-living way station on our way to California as we fled the Dust Bowl
— a cult compound
— a house used for a non-Equity summer stock company
— something out of Grapes of Wrath (see above) …
— or the Waltons
— a house in a ghost story
— the Munster homestead

One late-night conversation:

“I feel like we’re in a John Steinbeck novel. Like we’re fleeing the Dust Bowl and stopped here for a night with 30 other families.”
“Right! Or there’s a girl with a prosthetic leg up there –” gesture at the raw bare ceiling. None of us except the speaker knew what this meant, or what it had to do with the Dust Bowl. Perhaps I hadn’t read Grapes of Wrath closely enough and had missed something? It also sounded literal, so we all glanced up, fearfully, half expecting to see a girl with a prosthetic leg dangling from the ceiling beams that we somehow had never noticed before.
“Wait. What?”
“Where is she?”
“You know that Flannery O’Connor story about the girl with the prosthetic leg who is lured to the barn by the Bible salesman, who then sexually assaults her and takes her leg?”
“Good Country People.”
“Yes!”
Long silence.
“I’m not sure what that has to do with John Steinbeck.”
An EXPLOSION of hilarity. It continues to this day.
“I honestly thought a girl with a prosthetic leg would be dangling from the ceiling.”
“I didn’t know what the hell you were talking about.”
“God, that was terrifying.”
“I thought – is a girl locked in an attic up there? Should we go get her out?”
“I feel like we’re in a cult compound in the middle of the Texas panhandle.”

It is enormous with hallways leading to off-hallways with beds crammed in every corner, and upstairs porches clearly built long after the house was built. Kind of tacked on. The ceilings are bare wooden beams, as are most of the walls. No insulation. It would be unlivable in the winter. It is filled with random objects. Everywhere. Glass bottles. Deer heads. Huge old victrolas. Calendars on the wall dating to the 19th century. Tables that fall over. Porch with rotting floorboards that gave way, alarmingly, when you stepped on them. Step-stools that fall apart if you touch them. On the second floor, one room had double doors that led to nowhere. Just the empty air over the porch. We had to block it off. Teeny miniature chairs. Doors leaning against the walls, unattached to anything. Someone removed that door in 1979 and has never touched it again. Post-It notes everywhere warning us to not open this, don’t touch that, please don’t go through here. Random metal bars criss-crossing the air over our beds. For curtains used to separate different immigrant groups on their way to greener pastures? (The jokes abounded on what those bars were for. “Maybe three or four families stayed in this room?” “Maybe it was part of the Underground Railroad?” “Maybe it was to separate the Russian immigrants from the Ukrainian immigrants?”) One of the bedrooms had an ancient collage on the wall of front-pages from newspapers dating to 1980, showing the election of Reagan and the return of the hostages from Iran. It was so alarming-looking that we hung stuff in front of it so we wouldn’t have nightmares. As huge as the house is, the kitchen was too small to hold more than two people at a time, and if you stood at the fridge, you blocked people’s exit/entrance. “Excuse me” was said every other second. On the fridge was a typed-out warning: “ENTER TREEHOUSE AT YOUR OWN RISK.” None of us ever found a treehouse on the property. No washer/drier. None of the clocks (digital and non-digital) worked. A fireplace with a Post-It on top: “Don’t use.” A woodstove with a Post-It: “Doesn’t work.” Double front doors with a Post-It on one door: “Only open this half of the door.” An actual ball-and-chain which we found lying in the middle of the living room floor when we walked in. An old-fashioned radio (we listened to the Red Sox games from that radio since the joint may have been overflowing with Post-It notes and bedrooms, but it did not have NESN.) A TINY TV screen, basically a computer on a random broke-down table. I watched the penultimate episode of The Bachelorette on that tiny screen. CHASE??! NO!!! NOOOOOOO. JO JO, HOW COULD YOU. It ruined my day. Most of the house was of the ramshackle-Munster-Waltons-Dust-Bowl variety, but then you turned a corner on the first floor and suddenly there was a living room right out of a suburb in Iowa, with a recliner, a little glass table, a proper and ladylike couch, and a rug on the floor. Nobody ever went in there. Out of all the crazy rooms in this house, that one was the creepiest.

None of this is meant as a complaint. The house was an ongoing source of comedy (and danger, and splinters). We all have great affection for it. Plus 10 steps down to our very own dock. Plus an in-tune piano. We all play so there was much music. And each other. All in the same place at the same time.