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  The post and tube wiring has been replaced by contemporary vinyl clad cables, and many more of them.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.