This well-worn house

Posted 8/21/12

Our old house has seen a lot. At 163 years old, it has come through the eras of the oil lamp and the sad iron. The wood-burning cook stove and the outhouse.

My spinster cousin Claudine Nearing, …

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This well-worn house

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Our old house has seen a lot. At 163 years old, it has come through the eras of the oil lamp and the sad iron. The wood-burning cook stove and the outhouse.

My spinster cousin Claudine Nearing, one of my many relatives to have lived in this house through the years, changed into her white eyelet dress each afternoon for tea. She had a swooning couch tucked into a kitchen corner. And she had what became known as her “secret shrine” with religious pictures and statues that was set up in the living room where, strangely enough, our computer is currently located—where I am seated now as I write this column with high-speed Internet service.

Claudine lived here without electricity or indoor plumping until the 1970s, when her nephew bought this house and commenced to modernize it—not only with a bathroom and a furnace, but also orange shag carpet and vinyl siding.

Sitting here now I can hear the creak of the original hemlock floor boards that we found under that carpet when we moved here in 1998. The boards were cut from hemlock stands on our old farm when this house was built in 1852.

Lucien Nearing, another old cousin who also lived in this house, is remembered as a real busybody—listening in on the conversations of his party line neighbors on this house’s first crank-style telephone. He would also rush to the door to see any automobile that might be driving along Nearing Road in front of our house.

I wonder what Lucien would think of the many people who drive by these days (often holding their cell phones out of their windows) hoping to find cell service on our road—a known location to get service in our neighborhood.

Sitting here now I feel the crush and mix of all the time and people that this well-worn house has seen. Babies were born here. People died here and were laid out in this room where I am sitting now. It is quiet now—but in a few hours when everyone is home from school and work, there will be our usual and not so usual hubbub.

Consider last Thursday, an evening like any other with dinner and homework and the evening news—but also the added excitement of my daughter as she watched her friend’s cat give birth to kittens live streaming via the Internet. My daughter, seated on the sofa, watched the blessed event on her iPad, all the while talking with her friend, and shouting feline birth coach reassurances such as “You can do it, Kitty!” My husband was busy trying to set up his new cell phone (albeit, a dinosaur style flip-phone) and my son was blasting the Twenty One Pilots song “Car Radio.” “I ponder of something great/My lungs will fill and then deflate/They fill with fire/Exhale desire/I know it’s dire/My time today…” Meanwhile I was setting the table for dinner.

I couldn’t help wondering what Claudine would think of it all. She probably would need her swooning couch.

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