The House that Jack...or Somebody...Built

The kitchen door swings open. It's my 9-yr-old, with a very emergent seriousness on her face, shovel in hand that's taller than she is, spade gleaming. "Mom, Dad needs you to come right now...there's a snake!"..."I'm not going to kill a snake."..."He just wants you to come!" I don my shoes and go outside. It's a good-sized adder, hiding its head (but forgetting about its long body) under some boards that used to be the walls of our house...And my husband is surprisingly calm...no longer jumping around and squealing like a woman. I am so proud. We admire its spots, I touch it with a fingertip (the girls are aghast), and it slowly slithers under the floor, just as the dog comes over to investigate. All that is left of our house at this point is the floor, the roof, and the corner posts. But this is just a remnant of our old house, the living room...which has recently been serving as an eye-sore of a shed. The mobile home and the other addition were torn down and hauled off 5 years ago.

In the spring of 2000, my husband and I bought that mobile home (circa 1968?) with its additions, and moved out of our apartment. The first time we looked at it was in the winter. We had to walk up the steep unplowed driveway, peered in the windows, and then walked around the front of the house onto the deck. We saw the view of the river valley before us, and we both knew immediately that this was where we needed to be, in fact - why weren't we here already? To most of our friends and family this was a huge leap of faith. OK, actually they thought we were nuts. The view was great, but the "house" had actually been camp to a guy from Massachusetts. When he wasn't there, the squirrels and the mice ruled the roost. I spent the first week after the bank-closing cleaning up the mouse-turd runways in the kitchen and removing acorns out of all the nooks, crannies, and drawers in the rest of the house. There was a screened-in, warp-floored porch that ran the length of the trailer, which might've been nice to have had dinners on, but we really just stored all our extra big stuff out there. We were going for the white-trash look, and we did it well, I might add. But our 10 acres were private, in the woods like I had grown up in...the house cozy with its post and beam addition, woodstove, and brick fireplace. There was a big beautiful lawn and a little flower garden already planted. But most of all...it was just simply Ours.

In this one-bedroom house we conceived and raised our children through their toddler years. We hauled firewood from shed to porch to woodstove. We had little fans going all winter long to help insure that the warmth of it (and dust and soot) made it down the hall of the trailer to the bedroom, where our king-sized bed, and ONLY our king-sized bed, fit between its walls (later on we did squeeze a bassinet into the doorway).

There was a small room that housed the water heater and washing machine. After a year or two of drying laundry on racks in front of the woodstove and outside, I finally got a dryer, but that had to go in the kitchen. I didn't care. It was glorious.

Our bathroom was pink..the tub, the sink, the wallpaper...maybe even the toilet. When we moved in, there was blue shag rug in there too. This, not so glorious. However, there was a small rectangular crank-out window right in the wall of the bathtub. That was pretty cool. To this day I miss looking out while I shampoo...watching the sun come up over the valley, hoping to see a deer on the lawn (there were never any), and in the summertime smelling the warmth hit the abhorable and indestructible orange daylillies that grew (and still grow) on that side of the house.

We had a dining room. We served Thanksgiving dinners there and our very first Easter dinner just a week or two after we moved in. I think our families liked coming to our little ramshackle house. It really was cozy, if nothing else. That dining room is where I fed my babies their first bites of real food. Every day I'd set daughter #2's car seat on the table, turn the dryer on (in the kitchen), and watch her nap. In that room I stood and watched my oldest daughter walk (almost run!) to me for the first time (after I'd been out of town for the weekend), both of us laughing and proud. At our dining room table we sat and chose floor plans for our new would-be house.

The living room is where my desk was, where I sat and worked in the middle of the night so that I could be free during the day to take care of the girls. My fingers froze until the woodstove got pumping. Anybody who has had a woodstove knows it's either feast or famine (freezing, or so hot you're opening up doors to the outside). On the living room floor I watched my babies roll over for the first time. Daughter #2 took her first steps here, at about 10 PM after refusing to go to sleep until she did. Also on this floor was our king-sized mattress the last month before we moved into the new house (we had built another bedroom addition, but we had to tear it off so that the halves of our new ranch would have enough room to be hauled through the yard). On that mattress, what became the family bed, we watched the Red Sox break their curse, and during the day I would prop the mattress up against the wall and hope it didn't fall on anyone. It was in this living room that I sat rocking my 6-month-old baby girl, as I watched planes fly into the World Trade Center towers, watched them collapse...and I promised her, in all my uncertainty, that I would keep her safe, always.

The kitchen was the hot spot for critters. It was a constant battle for almost 5 years. D-CON, traps, and ant killer were staples on my shopping list. My husband and I can still recognize essence of dead mouse from two counties over. And I'll never forget coming home one fall day, about 3 months pregnant, to find a snake coiled up between kitchen closet and stove, which I manhandled back outdoors with tongs and oven mitts. This kitchen is where we blocked in Deacon when he was a puppy, til he was big enough to hop the gate. It was here that my husband rubbed my pregnant belly and told me how much he loved and supported me. The kitchen sink is where I bathed my baby girls (after I got the house warmed up to at least 65 degrees). It was here I made all our family meals, washed bottles and sippy cups, and baked little-girl birthday cakes. It was in this room that my husband came home from work one day to tell me he wasn't happy anymore, and I had turned and stared out the window above the sink, crying and asking why and how...but I knew...because I wasn't happy either.

It was in this house that too many changes all at once had threatened but ultimately failed to pull us apart. It was in this house that we fell in love with each other a second time, and even harder than the first. Love, lots of tears, even more laughter, and the sound of toddling footsteps had filled those walls, the walls that now lay in strewn piles across our yard.

Our new house isn't so new anymore, but I don't think we've started taking it for granted yet. I've sworn I will move or burn it down if I ever find a mouse in my kitchen. I love going over to the wall and adjusting the thermostat (not covered in ash dust). We kept our fireplace mantle and made it into a shelf on our living room wall. I painted all the rooms and decorated them myself...on the rare occasion I can even see and enjoy those details above the kids' clutter. This is our Home now. I cried my last old-house tears in 2005 when my husband crumpled the trailer with an excavator and stuffed it into an oversized dumpster. We still find bits of glass and the occasional treasure out near the driveway.

But today, after we stood watching the snake (which I thought was fitting as it reminded me of that tonged-and-mitted day in my old kitchen), my husband hitched a chain between his truck and what was left standing of our old living room, the last bit of that precious period in our lives, and...pulled it down. I'm not sure what was more thunderous...the sound of the fireplace and chimney crashing down onto the roof that fell before it...or the momentary aching in my heart. I'm pretty sure it was the latter.