A tree fell in our yard recently. It grazed the roofline before coming to rest on one side of the gabled roof, the chaos of leaves and branches just visible from the front walk. It cracked toward the base, roots still intact, then fell slowly, as if asking permission, carefully gauging how it could do what it needed to do without harming the house, our home.
Perhaps it felt a kinship with the mossy green planking of our walls. As the story goes, the original owner, a gifted architect, built the house from trees already on the lot. He worked slowly and methodically from his carpenter’s bench in the garage to make a home for his family.
When his daughter visits now, she tells us stories from her childhood. How she helped paint the kitchen, how her mother loved to host, how she and her friends kept beer cold in the creek behind the house in halcyon high school days.
My roommates and I live as humble renters in this house. It’s a low-slung rambler in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, set on a wooded lot, and every cabinet and detail are crafted and placed with great care.
It is a beautiful, strange home. The interior is all wood paneling, the floor a dark green marble. A glass panel, reaching not quite to the ceiling and punctuated by more wood separates the dining room from the entryway. The large open room at the back of the house, where once a white baby grand piano stood (according to old photos we have seen), is twice the height of the rest of the house and surrounded by floor to ceiling windows. In the winter, we are flooded with light. In the spring and summer, as the forest around us buds and leafs, we are plunged into a woody darkness. Fall brings a slow relief of light again. The sunny yellow kitchen is warm the whole year round, a necessary antidote to summer gloom.
We are proud guests here. We tell its story, show off the gaudy gold and white floral wallpaper of the master bedroom, chivying our guests from space to space so they do not miss a single wonder. Some guests ask a million questions and leave enthralled. Others, perhaps more tidy or white-washed in their sensibilities, admire the oddity of this place but leave relieved. They shudder to think of old pipes, black bathroom fixtures against a gold and black wallpaper, general strangeness. I think perhaps they cannot picture living in a home made without them in mind. For he made it as his own, in the style and manner he thought best. To live here is an invitation to his life, the house’s life. We remember and participate in what he envisioned for these walls.
Sometimes in the early morning, I stand or sit in the dining room and watch the light peek through the kitchen’s screen door, drift across the built-in china cabinets, gleam off the red dining room doors with their high brass knobs, bathe the green marble. Or I flip on the light in the hallway back toward the bedrooms and weave down the passageway, staring at the intricate gold, geometric shapes of the wallpaper.
I have lived here for five years, the longest time I’ve spent in any home or place outside my childhood one. My roommates and I have have hosted parties and dinners, sat and laughed long beneath the light over the kitchen table, cried quietly on the wraparound porch, wrestled with the cranky boiler, fought back moisture and spiders, read for peaceful hours, slept peacefully or fitfully in its four bedrooms. We have made it our home.
A home built from love keeps loving its inhabitants. It frames our days with its warm wood walls, its permeability to the woods beyond. We have lived better here. The craft with which it was made is a constant reminder to look up, to care, to move slowly, to attend. It has made us neater, cleaner, more careful to set the table before eating, more gracious in our use of things. At least it has for me.
Living in a beautiful home is not like looking at a beautiful thing. It is not the same as going to a museum, staring at a painting, picking up an intricate piece of jewelry, gazing at a sunset. Living in a beautiful home is like being turned into a beautiful thing. It makes you new at heart in its womb of grace.
Sometimes things break and fall apart, they are uprooted. This house is no stranger to the facts of things. There are holes in the porch roof from other tree falls.
The owner passed the house to his son who lived here until his death, a curmudgeonly bachelor by all accounts. He quarrelled with his only sister, sold off the white piano, stymied his neighbors as he let the lot grow wild and the house decay. Alone at the end, he cared enough to entrust it to his niece down in Texas, who fixed it up and entrusted it to us, her renters.
I’m moving out soon, and the prospect feels as violent as the fall of a tree. I am trying not to break too much as I go.