An Old, Old House
We run hot and cold, my house and me.
The house was built in 1802, back when Maine was still Massachusetts and the United States was just a whippersnapper; it stays fairly dispassionate. After all, it had reached the wise old age of 174 by the time I was even born. In all that time, only seven other families have owned it. Whole lives have been lived here, while Portland grew and changed and burned to the ground and grew again, while the United States expanded from just 16 states to 50.
Homeownership is new to me, though, and I’ve gone through all the classic stages: ambivalence, attraction, passion, betrayal, reconciliation, and true love – with a few extra rounds of ambivalence, just to keep things interesting.
Six years ago, my husband and I stood on the back stairs of this big, old house, looked into each other’s eyes, and said “this is it” and “no way” at the exact same time. I blame the stairs for Ari’s enthusiasm; he grew up in a house with two sets of stairs, and he spent his youth going down and around and up and over, over and over again. My resistance faded after a few martinis, and by the next afternoon we were under contract.
A few months later, we moved from a shiny apartment in suburban Boston to 2200 square feet of trouble in Portland’s West End. Not the fancy part of the West End, mind you, but the part where someone might walk across your flagstone patio – which lacked landscaping and felt more like a wide spot in the sidewalk – and pee against the side of your house. I learned that the hard way.
The architecture books tell me this house was built in the Federal style, which must be a fancy way of saying that it’s a big box, with three big square rooms downstairs and three square big rooms upstairs, plus a little room tucked beneath the stairs. More than anything, this house is sturdy. It has withstood the insults of asbestos siding and cheap wall-to-wall carpet; it has been tenderly cared for and loved. It is a blank slate, ready to take anything we can give it. So we’ve reinvented it many times, repainting, rearranging, and transforming it inside and out. We added a gas fireplace, tore down an ugly drop ceiling, renovated a bathroom with fancy tile and glass blocks. We’ve built stone walls, raised beds, and fences; the only people peeing on the patio now are my children.
As surely as I’ve changed it, this house is making its mark on me. I’ve grown from a carefree newlywed to a thirty-something mother of two. I’ve learned to work with contractors and compare quotes, to patch horsehair plaster and build stairs. I’ve laid claim to odd nooks, lined the walls with over-stuffed bookshelves, and balanced hand-me-down furniture with deeply discounted designer rugs.
Despite my long still-to-do list, I can proudly say that my family truly inhabits this house, and that it finally looks like us. It also holds the history of seven other families – of spinster sisters, boarders, and an old man who never lived anywhere else – and in some ways it will never be mine. I sometimes crave the complete ownership I’d have with a new house. But I suspect I’d miss the ghosts and the energy and the temperament of my old, old house.
This piece originally appeared as a response to Housekeeping.
