Connections

We had been working on the Victorian cottage on South Broadway for a year or so. It goes without saying that it was more of a job than we’d ever anticipated. But heck, we were young. Invincible. Bulletproof. Indestructible. Undefeatable. Nothing could discourage us, not even the evil vagaries of plaster.

Yes, of course the interior of the house had been plastered, except for a few modern applications. We,  being purists, decided to maintain as much of the plaster as we could. That posed all sorts of problems. In places, the plaster had separated from the lathe work, was loose and near collapse. At other places, cracks let us know of ancient pressures too great to resist. In the corner of a bedroom ceiling, a spot nearly three-feet-square had been damaged and repaired in rather amateurish fashion.

That brings about an interesting story. About that time, someone left a message on our front door stating that a woman who had been born in the house was still alive and living in a Jewish retirement home in Toledo, Ohio. The note included her telephone number. She had been born Brunhilda Fox, raised in the house we now owned, and was delighted to receive the call I made to her the next day.

It was as if a ghost had stopped wandering the house and settled down to visit. She told us about when the house was built, “out in the country.” She mentioned her father’s old suitcase and wondered if it happened still to be in the attic. It was. She told of many things, like getting their first telephone. Her mother had demanded it. She even told us where it had been attached to the wall in a hall. She told us where her father worked and how his boss, Mr. Gans, had chided him for not building a home “in town.”

She told us about the spot in the bedroom ceiling. It seems that her brother and she had been exploring the attic when he stepped through the ceiling and made the spot. They repaired it, but not very well. Sad to say, she reported, her brother died in World War One. But the marks of his youthful over-enthusiasm remained for us to see.

Those “discovering moments” are what makes the trials and tribulations of old-house restoration worthwhile, if only for a moment. The ebb and flow of past lives speak to you as nothing else can. It is invigorating to be a part of it.

I think about that sometimes in a house we own now. In a walk-in closet, marks on a rear wall illustrate the growth in height of the two girls who grew up here. One can see the march of life as their measurements march upwards in the path from childhood to womanhood. I wouldn’t paint over those marks and numbers for anything.

Crazy? Yeah I suppose so.