Spring Has Sprung

My neighbor, Joanne shares her lilacs with us – the bushes sit alongside her house and lean over so we can get the benefit of their great smelling flowers. I appreciate both Joanne and her lilacs.

The other day I noticed the flower buds are starting to push out and I got to thinking about all the springs this old house has seen. I suppose the most welcome springs for the home’s residents would have been 1933, the year of the Siberian Express and then The Blizzard of 1949.

The Siberian Express of 1933

A month before FDR took office and in the depths of the Great Depression, a record breaking cold snap hit North America. It began on February 6 with temps of 90 below zero in Verkhoyansk, Siberia. On February 9 Wyoming’s coldest recorded temperature, 63 below was noted in Moran; Montana had its coldest temp ever the same day in West Yellowstone – 66 below zero!

(from: http://www.shmoop.com/news/2010/02/18/6-worst-winter-storms-history/ and http://www.oregonphotos.com/pagetwentyone-Q-1.html#anchor46827)

Original in Carbon County Museum

The Blizzard of 1949

Search the Internet for Blizzard 1949 and you will find photos of the storm’s aftermath – snow piled higher than roof tops, locomotive engines buried, highways with a wall of snow on either side.

New Years Day saw the start of the storm and big sections of central and eastern Wyoming were buried. Some rural residents were marooned for weeks. (from: http://uwacadweb.uwyo.edu/ROBERTSHISTORY/cold_winters_buffalo_bones.htm)

This year we had a mild winter, but everyone in the region knows the next one may be a doozie. So I join my neighbors who are outside on this lovely March day celebrating spring.

Pillows, Shams, Scarves and Duvets… and Foo-Foos

I’m a pretty normal guy of my generation (I think).  I could live on simple food and in uncomplicated housing.   I’d happily wear jeans and t-shirts all day, have the same boring breakfast, drink two cups of coffee and a Coke daily, then eat a peanut butter sandwhich and a glass of milk for lunch and leftovers for dinner. 

<< An interrupting aside.  You know, a place that sold leftovers would be a great place to shop for a guy like me.  I’d rather not cook, but I like yesterday’s food quickly  microwaved….. just sayin’ >>

I’m married to an amazing cook with a great sense of style who (somehow) feels compelled to take care of me.  Bev makes sure I don’t leave the house (if she’s around) without checking my apparel, hair, beard and whatever.  She feeds me (very well), makes sure my hair is not too ridiculous, tells me if my socks don’t match and generally keeps me from looking like the simpleton I am.

You can tell who decorated (and continues to improve) our house.  If it weren’t for Bev, I’d still have those orange crates and the 1 X10s that served as my bookcase in 1973.  And that old vinyl love seat from my brothers brother –in-law?  I’m sure it would be Ok if I had enough duct tape….

But the B&B has to have an entirely different level of style.

So we recently updated to all new mattresses, pillows, shams, (not scams, but if you saw the price….), sheets, duvets (sounds like “due-vayz”) with and duvet covers.  Oh yes, bed scarves.  These are long things that go across the bottom of the bed to keep the duvets and their covers clean when folks put their suitcases on the bed.  

So this guy (who still goes to India and sleeps on the ground with villagers), now has to (gets to?) move several square pillows (the euro-shams), a bolster (a long cylinder of colorful “don’t-you-dare-get-it-dirty” uselessness), and a bed scarf before crawling in to bed.  And guess what?  In the morning when  I make the bed, these guys gotta go back on, smoothly, neatly, prettily….

Would I change a thing?  No, because all these foo-foos make my sweetie happy.  And when sweetie is happy… I’m happy!!!

Petrified

Bev and I bought this house in 1996.  Not long afterward my son Sam helped me replace the front steps.  That day, while digging around underneath the porch he found a piece of petrified wood.  I always thought the process took hundreds or thousands of years, but what we found was unmistakingly rock-like and undeniably in the shape of a fragment of lumber.  There was kind of a pit dug under the porch where Sam found it and we speculated that for years and years and years water had melted off the porch and soaked that piece of wood, drying out each spring to invest it with a few grams more of mineral deposits.

That chunk of wood kept its shape, even its texture, but when it was done, it had an entirely different character.

An ancient word problem asks: “if you had a woolen blanket and it began to unravel one end, and you took the strands and rewove them into the other end, at what point would the blanket be a different one?

The life of this old house is like that hunk of wood and also like that woolen blanket.

Most people would recognize a 1908 photo of the house as ours – it has the same exterior shape (except for the add-on garage and the Moss Creek Suite).  Yes, the color might be different, but its shape is the same.  But at some kind of organic level it has changed.  

It has gone from having no insulation in the walls, to having vermiculite – those nasty blown-in beads; now the vermiculite is gone from almost every wall and ceiling cavity, to be replaced by fiberglass.  Plaster and lathe has been torn down and replaced with sheetrock.  Hundreds and hundreds of square feet of sheetrock.  The post and tube wiring has been replaced by contemporary vinyl clad cables, and many more of them.  The old iron pipes are gone, replaced by PVC and vinyl tubing.

The structure of the house is the same and the purpose is (mostly) the same… and so it is the same.  But it isn’t the same too.

Like that woolen blanket, our old house unraveled, over time its innards came out (plaster and lathe, insulation, wire, pipe) to be swapped for something newer that serves the same purpose.  Trim was removed, refinished, and in some cases modified to fit new thermopane windows.  Is it the same?  Yes, but it is differently the same. The room that was once the parlor where the Benham family gathered became a bedroom; now it has a bath attached – and the maid’s room is gone.  The room serves a different purpose, has new wiring and now plumbing, some trim from a different mansion, a newer floor, and a gas insert in the fireplace.  But it’s the same room, and yes, it’s a different room.

If it could speak, the home of 1908 would tell stories about its family: Harry and Carrie, and Harry Jr. and Isabelle.  It would talk about that new invention the aero-plane, Carrie’s many petticoats and her bustle.  It might tell of young Harry and his buddies building forts on the lump of land across the street that later became know and Hideout Hill.  It seems even location names unravel – Andy, a neighbor boy, never heard it called Hideout Hill.  In 2012 our talking house might describe my grandson Jaden’s PS – a handheld gaming device with two video screens, or the secure WiFi system with a hardware firewall that our Harry installed over Christmas.

The same house?  A different house?  The coal burning, black smoke belching octopus of a boiler’s been replaced by a quiet clean forced air heater and air conditioner.  Somewhere inI between it had been converted to a gas powered boiler.  But the house is still cozy and warm in the winter.  The narrow kitchen with a countertop deficit now has square yards of granite wonderfulness.  The same?  Different?  The mom of the house was Carrie, today it is Bev, with perhaps more than a dozen moms in between.  Mom Carrie and Mom Bev both gave birth to a son named Harry, married a skinny mustached type ‘A’ husband, and rightfully took great pride in their house.  But Carrie lived and died at a time when few women were in the workforce, and Bev’s a hospital administrator.  Bev cooks with clean burning gas but Carrie had to find someone to chop firewood.  Carrie’s house was at the edge of town, the same house, now Bev’s, is considered to be in the middle of Sheridan.

Bev and I have slept in the African Room, the one that was Carrie and Harry’s Master Bedroom.  Have our conversations about the kids, the business, the neighborhood echoed theirs?  Did Carrie remind Harry she’d not be home to cook dinner because she would be with the church ladies, as Bev has reminded me?  Did Harry ever hug his spouse in that room and tell her “she’s the best thing that ever happened to him”?  The night before Harry headed back east on his September 1926 trip to Tennessee, did they talk late into the night like it was the last time? Most certainly it was, for he died in on September 26 in Columbia, Tennessee.

So Sam’s shard of wood was petrified.  But this house?  Its alive.

I think our visitors would agree.

Coal Bin Flag

The dirtiest part of resurrecting this old house was cleaning the coal bin.

If you’ve never been in a coal bin, you may not have a sense of how coal dust can get everywhere. I mean ev-er-y-where.  Coal dust is insidious.  It gets everywhere on your body – even in places you didn’t know you had places.  And it instantly goes airborne when disturbed from its decades-long slumber.

A normal shop vacuum filter has no use in this environment.  Coals dust passes right through the filter.  The only way to capture the dust is with one of the expensive filters.

Our coal bin took two days to clean and dismantle.

The best part about the job was finishing.  The second best part was this old flag.

This 48 star flag is easy to date.  Arizona, our 48^th state was added in 1912, roughly four years after Harry & Carrie Benham built this great old house.   It was replaced by our current 50 star flag in 1960 when Alaska and Hawaii were added to the Union.  So in 2007 when I found this flag in the coal bin it was between 47 and 95 years old.

I can’t narrow it down any more than that, but I like to imagine the flag was placed there about the time the old coal burner furnace was converted to gas – maybe in the 1950s.

As you can see its pretty well worn out, its been wet too. 

So were a couple of boys using the now abandoned coal bin as a hideout? Did the 1950's mom throw a fit when they came upstairs all black with coal dust?  Ah… if only this old house could tell me more….