Open Writing

When I first settled in the US, one of the most peculiar adjustments I had to make was in dealing with the time scale of its history. The term “ancient” meant nothing here, except perhaps to American Indians, and only a few tribes had any tangible evidence of the age of their heritage; the rest just had their verbal history and their lore.

For the rest of US citizens, “old” or “very old” were the only calibrators, and those related to artifacts dating from say the 1500’s at most. That was when the Dutch and Spanish were establishing settlements and exploring the eastern seaboard. As an immigrant Englishman, the 1500’s seemed relatively recent to me.

Within half an hour’s walk from my childhood home in England lie the ruins of an Abbey, destroyed by Henry VIII as part of his Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536. Scattered around the county where I lived are Doomsday Villages from the Norman occupation in 1086. In the woods behind my childhood home are the ruins of a Roman outpost.

My first home in America was close to Philadelphia, probably one of the most historic cities in the Country, and I lived there through the Bicentennial celebrations in 1976. It was difficult for me to share in the wonder many citizens expressed when touring historic parts of the city at that time; 200 years was surely only yesterday in historic terms.

One of the four houses I have owned in the 36 years I have lived in the United States, had been built 31 years before I purchased it. Even with my, by now, distorted perspective of the passage of time, it seemed old, possibly because it was by far the oldest dwelling I have lived in here.

I later discovered it had been built by the original owner, using reclaimed timbers from other buildings. Many houses were similarly constructed at the time, and that fact likely contributed to it feeling older than its 31 years. As I worked at remodeling the house, small clues about its past were revealed, and of the previous roles of the reclaimed wood.

Discolored patterns on some of the joists told of where they had been joined to other structural members, or where rusted metal fittings had been attached. The joists and floorboards were roughly twice the size of today’s standards. As I removed ceiling plaster in one room I was startled to see several charred joists, indicating perhaps that the building they came from had been destroyed by fire.

In a kitchen wall I found a faded letter, written it seemed by a child, and probably never mailed, since it was unfinished. It contained nothing that might enlighten me about the child or its parents, but in some strange way it transformed what had been just a house, into a home, in that it was evidence of occupancy.

Some time afterwards, I was working in the garden and saw a young man and woman walking along the road, pausing twice to take photographs of my house. A little defensively I asked them why. It transpired that the woman’s father had built the house, and that she had been born and raised there, later moving with her family to California. This was the first time she had returned.

She was staying in the neighborhood with the young man, with whom she had grown up, and who still lived close by. Feeling reassured, I invited them inside and gave them a tour, wondering what the woman would make of my radical remodeling. From her conversation with her companion, it became clear that she was seeing, not what I had changed, but what she remembered of her childhood there.

Her comments were addressed to her friend, and I felt that I was but an invisible observer of another’s life, like Dickens’ Jacob Marley in “A Christmas Carol.” After my visitors had reminisced for a while, they took their leave, and later it occurred to me that I had learned almost nothing about the house or its original occupants.

My wife and I had a very different experience with a house she owned when we first met. It was over 120 years old, and had been built as a farmhouse on the shores of Lake Keuka in New York State. The people she purchased the house from, Charlie and Harriet Potter, had divided the large lot, and had built a new, smaller house in which they now lived.

Harriet’s father had purchased the farmhouse for a dollar and unpaid taxes before she was born, then some sixty years ago. It had stood empty for many years before that, after serving as a home for “wayward girls,” that had occupied it after the farmer moved on.

At the time Harriett’s family purchased the house, it had electricity, but the well had run dry, so her father dug a trench across the road and laid a pipe to the lake. Later, town water became available. These events and almost all the others Harriet related about the history of the house had been recorded in now faded photographs.

When my wife sold the house and we moved away, Harriet presented us with a photo album containing the all pictures. These included one taken just before her parents moved in, and showed a mature tree growing up through the roof of a bay window. The album was a wonderful gift, and now is even more than that, because the next owner bulldozed the house and built a new one.

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