That Old House by Lydia C. Buchanan
The first time I saw it, I was awake.
I was trekking through the neighborhood next to mine, on my way to work. It was a long walk, but one of those perfect summer days that just a few months earlier, in the thick gloom of Boston winter, would have felt impossible. And so, when it finally comes, the city soaks it in. My strolling location: a wealthy neighborhood with one of the highest PhD per capita ratios in the country. You get the idea: brownstones and irregular, shingled mansions. It was summer. I walked. Other people walked. Some people ran; some people biked. Past the Greek bakery, and the nail salon, and the Russian School of Mathematics. I have no idea what the Russian School of Mathematics is, only where.
On my way past a daycare—one of three on my route—I scooted over on the sidewalk to make room for a 4-seat stroller. It was a red plastic square of babies in two rows, each strapped into a swiveling seat and lazing in its own orbit, caregivers at either end to push and clear the way. It was distracting—so many babies. So many babies staring at their own hands. They rolled by, all of us in a daze. And there, around the corner I skirted to make room for the tiny, was the mirage. One minute, I was watching babies not watch the sky. The next, instead of breath, there was a great silence blooming in my chest.
The mirage had a three-column porch, and a big, purple, wooden front door. Behind the glass in the door hung a panel of lace. Maid of the mist. It had taupe-painted shingles and white trim and wide windows and bright plants in the yard. A yard. In the city. Green, glory. The windows held the same kind of glass as the door: the thick, old kind that warps vision. Above the porch, a widow’s walk. To the right of the porch, a tower. It started on the ground and ended at the sky, topped with its own cone. Tower.
I could tell you it’s a Victorian, but that summons frills and buttresses and stripes, and I hate multicolored trim more than almost anything.
I could tell you it’s a Queen Anne, but I think she did frills also. Edwardian? I give up.
I tell you: It was perfect, the kind of perfect I didn’t know had power over me.
Years ago, when friends of mine from college started buying houses, I considered it a lack of imagination. They married within twelve months of graduation. They got something like the job they had studied for. (They had studied things with jobs: engineering, elementary education, business.) They looked around for what to do next. Too soon for babies. What were strangers their age doing? Buying houses. Purchasing long-term hobbies. What does homeowner Jim do for fun? He mows the lawn and squares the hedges. What does homeowner Sally do? She wallpapers the hallway and organizes linens.
Okay. In this gender-normative example, I’ve given Sally the tasks that don’t seem too bad, Jim the ones that make me want to go back to bed. Now you know who I am.
But my point remains: Isn’t boredom why some people—confident people whose lives are working out for them—buy houses? Boredom is the root of all my mistakes. That, and the adult disappointment of being bookish.
When these friends were buying houses, I was in grad school to become a writer. I was moving, again. I wanted no plot of land to commit and return to. I wanted no possessions that couldn’t fit in my car. Their confidence shocked, horrified, me. How dare they feel so certain, make such permanent decisions. Fools.
But I am beginning to know humility. What if, instead of boredom, or a lack of imagination, some people buy houses out of love?
The mirage owned me.
What a traitor, my heart.
That evening, after work, I walked home on the other side of the road, stopped and stared across two lanes and two sidewalks so I could take it all in. I sighed. I wanted it. My house.
I started taking people around to see it. My husband, when we were out walking. My sister, when she was in town. Do you want to see my house? Let’s go!
Now, I see it in dreams. Not necessarily my house, embodied as is it a mile from my current apartment. But my house. In the dreams, there is an open back door and hours of sunlight. There is a kitchen counter covered in fresh tomatoes. Sometimes, out the window, it is snowing. Sometimes, I’m holding a book inside my bathrobe. Always, I’m not wearing socks, and I am not afraid.
I can’t believe I’d want something as frivolous as a house with windows so old they warp vision.
But I am afraid. Bamboozled. I’ve never longed for property ownership. It sounds like that: onerous. Lawns to mow and driveways to shovel and insurance to buy, property taxes to pay. What am I forgetting? It doesn’t matter. The worries would have my name on them, searching me out like heat-seeking missiles. With an unstable job—unpaid writer, part-time college writing instructor twice over—and an ancient car and a partner deep in the throes of a terminal degree in a field with no prospects (it’s not engineering), my life can’t support anything else maintained by worry and sinkholes of time. I can’t believe I’d want something as frivolous as a house with windows so old they warp vision.
As with most problems of my heart, the cause is, in part, books: Barton Cottage, Orchard House, Manderley, Pemberly, Villa Villekulla, Bag End—I am happy to be swept away by the literary fantasia of a house with a name, a house with a character.
But also, it’s New England. Currently, I live in Boston. That’s where I saw my house. Or rather, I saw it in a small city that exists within the limits of the city of Boston but for predictable demographic reasons, refuses to incorporate into the city proper. And I grew up here. Not in Boston, but two hours southeast, on Cape Cod. For the years I was in college and graduate school, years that I maintained I had no interest in homeownership, I lived elsewhere. Places where blocks were squares, places where road names were grid numbers, lawns and roofs were flat. Places where the windows were never drafty, the radiators never clicked out of time, the floors were more likely to be carpet than hardwood, the front doors insulated metal. Who am I kidding: there were no radiators. There was central air. The houses were, perhaps, affordable, but they inspired nothing in me. It was not as bold as I imagined it was to claim that I didn’t want to own one. I didn’t like them.
It took three years of life in Boston for New England—the land of old houses, the land of my childhood, mythologized in steep roofs and irregular floor plans; thick, wooden doors and painted shutters—to break me.
There is, especially here in New England but not only here in New England, an industry built around the care and feeding of old houses. The bureaucracy: Historic Preservation Committees regulating flora and fauna and paint colors. The money: replacement wallpaper companies. Irregular, historic window companies. Furniture preservation shops. Antique shops. Historic plaque shops, so strangers can know the age of your house, the last name of its first inhabitants. There are those businesses that painstakingly scrape back every layer of paint until they find the Original Shade. They will mix and sell you the Original Shade, for another small fee. And then, there are all the plumbers and electricians and painters and carpenters and stone masons called to fix what breaks often: old houses.
But before and after all this, there is the legend-maker, the mythology-builder, the jewel of WGBH, now in its 42nd season: This Old House. Perhaps you’ve seen it. I can’t imagine anyone not having seen it but then, I was raised on inherited, Puritan air: public television and frugality.
In This Old House, men in faded button-down shirts restore an old house. In every episode, there are scenes of boards being sliced and perfect holes being drilled. Men point to crumbling moldings and remove old wires, replace them with bright, new wires and fresh moldings. These men are methodical. They never make mistakes or imperfect cuts. The sound effects, too, are flawless: not so much construction that you get a headache, just enough screwdriver buzz that you believe work is happening. Everything fits as it should. By the end of the show, everything works as it should too. Everything is or will be a beautiful old house, impeccably maintained. No one tries to modernize the décor, only the functionality.
There is a spin-off show called Ask This Old House where viewers—people who own old houses—write in with home-repair questions. If their question is good enough, one of the Ask This Old House men shows up with a crew to film the solution. The homeowner helps and learns. Now we all know how to solve a humidity mystery, how to ground a wire, how to pick out a water-efficient toilet. We believe we could do it, and do it well.
We love old houses. We dream of old houses.
If we’re talking about brainwashing and mythologizing historic homeownership, I would name This Old House as one of the main perpetrators. It gives us faith in the knowability, the fixability, of old houses, of our own ability to possess and improve the things we love.
We love old houses. We dream of old houses. We never used to, but our fate was fixed long before all that. What I mean is, I never had a chance.
But I should know better, better than the TV show, better than the twee of Gilmore Girls, the rose-colored glasses of tourism: I grew up in an old house that tried its hardest to be inhospitable. Its repairs weighed on my mother’s shoulders almost as much as her children. In many ways, the concerns were one and the same: the hot water heater broke; the exterior walls weren’t insulated; the windows pre-dated adults and had sash cords in varying states of disrepair; the electrician came once and told us it was the wiring was “as old as it gets.” I thought this was exciting and told my friends. My house was historic! Combustible! One of those friends lived in the certified second-oldest house in town. Her house had a milk snake living in the walls. She won.
If we’re talking about betrayals, there is my heart: how it added desires without warning.
And there is Boston: when I was a child, Boston was the city. My family came here to go to museums and Christmas shows and the airport. I was excited, after years of early adulthood in the Midwest and then the South, to move to Boston, back home, almost. But in the five years since, Boston has chewed me up and spit me out scarred: there are no rooms in its inn, not for people like me, people who missed the entrance exam into the new upper class. I thought it would be a city of readers, and it is, but the city belongs to biotech and hospital and university administrators. They are re-making it in their image: filling in the ocean to assemble new neighborhoods of glass and metal, refurbishing historic buildings into lab space, constructing luxury housing with centralized air conditioning and color-splotched, squared exteriors, applying for zoning exemptions to stretch architecture further and further into the sky. They have exploded the housing market. They don’t care; they can afford any rent. They fund STEM programs in every university. They read self-published business e-books and Malcom Gladwell. They don’t remember taking an English class, having their heart broken by a sentence.
So, Boston has betrayed me twice over: it rejected me and all the literary dreams I had for myself. It is not a place to be a struggling writer, not financially, not socially. And, this rejection exposed the person I did not know I was, a conventional sort of person who wants a house and garden to control and neighbors to monitor out the window.
Okay, I’ll give the city this: it’s great for neighbor-monitoring.
By the time my parents were in their early thirties, as I am now, they had bought and sold one house and purchased another, the one my mother still lives in, the one I grew up in. My parents, when they bought this house, had three children, a fourth on the way. My father was a social worker. My mother was a teacher by trade, hands full of children.
When I turned thirty, none of my siblings had houses or children. You could call it choice, and it’s true that I choose not to live in Indiana, or Illinois, or Iowa where the housing market might look more realistic. That’s where my college friends, the ones who settled years ago, live. But I am not of such places. I tried to be, but like I said, my fate was fixed long ago.
Here, in Boston and its historic suburbs, we cannot afford houses, let alone children. We have things our parents had—Puritan work ethics and loves of beauty— and things our parents didn’t have—graduate degrees and student loans and two-career households—but property ownership isn’t for us. Deeded land is for people with other kinds of degrees: medical research, technology, old money, university deans.
So perhaps it’s only logical that I’m in for a pound, not a penny—if I’m going to dream of a vestige of a lost world, it might as well be as ethereal and unlikely as possible. ’70s ranches do not cut it. Neither do ’60s split-levels. Neither does anything built in the past 50 years. Overall, I hate new houses. I shrivel inside of them. The floors are too quiet, the walls too flat. The vacuum can fit in every corner. I can’t breathe. They’re not dead; they were never alive.
All I ask is Green Gables. Wood and windows and porches and no talk of career tracks.
Perhaps, instead, a vicarage in southern England?
A tower. Is it too much?
My house, too, the embodied one with a tower, is in one of the most expensive corners in an already expensive city. Think of trying to buy Versailles. Think of thinking Versailles seemed like a nice place to live. Different insanities.
Myths, of course, are designed to teach us things. Why there is fire, and winter, and death. Why we should temper ambition and curiosity.
But myths are simple stories, and in this, they are lies. They tell only one truth, and they tell it briefly and without shadows.
We want to believe that we can forge the things we love into our own image.
The myth of This Old House is that old houses are maintainable, affordable, practical. The lie is that love and measuring twice will be enough to make your old house a beautiful old house with level floors and safe wiring and just the right amount of project, whatever that amount might be for you. We want to believe that we can forge the things we love into our own image. That if we are patient and kind and generous, the object of our affection will mold itself to our desires.
It works for the faded-shirt men.
But it doesn’t work for cities. They are inflexible, mechanical, maniacal.
It doesn’t work for careers.
It doesn’t work for people either. Even if we think we know who we are, what we want, we can’t guarantee our hearts, can’t barricade them against internal winds of change.
Last summer, when I looked up from the rolling sidewalk babies, saw the mirage, and realized I wanted it, I was appalled. Here was something else I wanted and would never have. I would have to live with more longing, specific longing. I’ll never own that house, maybe a house at all.
If I can critique my desires, see all the flaws and pitfalls and cultural mirages they are built upon, can I release myself from them?
If I can admit my dreams are unoriginal—an old house, a plot of land with my name and clothesline on it, neighbors I can wave to—can I absolve myself from the shame of conventionality?
If, narratively speaking, a crisis is a moment of breakage in which the character receives a wound from which they cannot recover, that old, three-million-dollar house was mine. It was the moment I knew I was cursed in the way I had once thought myself exempt from: to desire ordinary things. What a fool I had been to think myself special. Old houses are the original sin of growing up in New England: we are born with them in our blood.
Faced with the purple door with the lace in the window, the porch, the tower, the whole shimmering mirage, I was as powerless. I transformed into what I was: a person whose dreams were not working out for them. A disappointed, disintegrating, adult, considering who she had once been, all the other things she might have wanted, too, instead, had things been different. I had told myself I didn’t want what my old friends wanted—no suburban neighborhoods, no wide, flat lawns, definitely no dogs—and it was true. I hate dogs. What I hadn’t known about myself was that I carried my own version of their dreams: A cat. An oak banister. A bed next to a drafty window so I could drift under a down comforter on a February evening and read, the wind on the other side of the wall howling me to sleep. It was in no way original. But I was on no track to have it, any of it, and I knew it and I knew, like an arrow to the heart, that I wanted it. My house.
I didn’t know if I could surrender my other dreams—the ones that were slowing sucking the marrow from my bones, the ones that gave me barely enough money to live, never enough to save or pay off student loans or move into a two-bedroom apartment—for it, but I knew, for the first time, that there was a cost to my choices. I had decided to try to be not an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or a nurse, but a writer, and the bill had come due. The first, not the last, of its kind. My house, never mine, not even in the distance, not for me, not if I kept expecting writing and Boston and academia to love me back. I sighed. It was too late to weep.
Once you leave home, you can never go back.
