Tearing Down the Old House – Memories

Tearing down the old house – Part 2

    Shortly after I cleaned my old house of its trash (see previous post), I answered an ad from two young men and their friends looking for used building materials. When they saw my little handmade house in the woods, they immediately loved it. They could see its past glory in its ghostly present. Wasn’t it a shame to tear it down? they asked. 

    Of course it was, but I had already struggled with that decision. It was time to let it go, and having Charlie and Travis recycle its materials into their own similar house was the best possible solution. When they began the demolition, I picked up my hammer and crowbar to help.

    Charlie and Travis respected all the love – and blood (yes), sweat (lots), and tears (of frustration) – that had gone into the building of the house. They never hesitated when I said, “Oh, wait. Don’t take that. I want to keep” – the “Live well; laugh often; love much” sign my mother painted on an old board; the stained glass window my daughter-in-law made;

the weaving on the missing window of the door to the pantry, where, when my son was little and before I did the weaving, we used to do puppet shows; the table top I made from tiles my brother gave me; the pole ladder I built to my sleeping loft, its rungs well oiled with my hands and feet climbing up and down every day for thirty-five years, one upright pole marked with my son’s yearly growth, like rings on a tree. 

I even salvaged the broken-plate mosaics I made when, after many years, I put a concrete foundation on the original one-room cabin and replaced the dirt floor with an oak floor.

    As though it had functioned as a mnemonic trap, each board I pried off released a flock of memories. “I bent a dozen nails trying to get this board in,” I remembered as I forced my crowbar under the oak flooring of my bedroom loft, wood that had come from a demolished 100-year-old house forty years ago.

    As I knocked out the framing of a window in the larger room, I told Travis I had added that room six years after building the original ten-by-twelve-foot house. “My son, Ela, was eight years old by then,” I said. “He was beginning to look like Alice in Wonderland with her arm sticking up the chimney and her neck bent against the roof.”

    As I pulled down paneling (rough-cut red pine a friend gave me and white Port Orford cedar I bought for a song), I remembered that for years those walls were burlap. Then one summer Ela, who had graduated from college and moved to Seattle, came home to help me replace burlap with this beautiful wood.

    As I pulled up the tongue-in-groove laminate flooring, I remembered putting it in – sawing the boards to fit, pushing the tongues into the grooves, forcing the last piece against the wall. Underneath was the plywood with its stenciled design my mother had painted when she came to visit. She didn’t much like the house (“It’s like camping,” she said, a derisive comment I took as a compliment), but she gave it her art.

    Upstairs, in what had been Ela’s room, I tore apart the bed I built him. The construction wasn’t the usual style, but the bed was strong and well braced. On the underside was a piece of rope running through a u-nail, part of a hammocks loom the bed became after Ela went to college.

    The manzanita railing Ela built on the deck was now broken, the deck itself unsafe under my feet. There were rotten boards on the back deck, too, just at the stairs I walked down every day to take a shower, outdoors, in view of Humpy Mountain, rain or shine, ice, fog, or snow. In winter I left the water running overnight so it wouldn’t freeze. One winter I had to step over a foot-high wall of ice made by the splashing water.

    The memories wouldn’t stop, but it seemed so right to be recycling one beloved house into another like it, to be giving my house, in a different form, to people who understood and loved it, that I couldn’t feel bad about its destruction. When Charlie and Travis left with the last trailer load of building materials, I gave them a copy of Living with All My Senses, my book about living in that little house. Holding it fondly, they said they would keep it on a table in their house as a reminder of the recycling of memories.