An inconvenient life - #149

Grit gone by.

A quick thing first: my friends at Trust & Travel have one spot left for their Mexico Writing Retreat, running February 6-10. I joined them in Nicaragua two years ago, and I am still reaping the benefits of my time spent with them. I find their retreats particularly great for refilling the well, and of course, for building unexpected life-long friendships. Maybe you’re the one they’re missing. If so, tell them I sent you.

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Simone Giertz is an inventor, and what she’s really good at inventing is solutions for small spaces. In the YouTube home series Never Too Small, Giertz points out bits and bobs, big-atures, and transforming pieces of furniture in her 630 sq ft home in Los Angeles. The space is charming. There’s a puzzle table that appears only after its plain top unfurls. Her desk chair has a wrapping staircase for her limping dog to climb into her lap. A stained glass window acts almost as a reverse trap door to a loft. The place oozes with both practical use and unexpected beauty.

It’s not Giertz’s first home (that would be a boathouse in her native Stockholm) but it is her darling, and she knows that quirk-to-quirk is a lineage easily lost in the housing market.

“I was like, whoever is selling this house is really going to care who it goes to. And I tried to make sure that I showed them that I would be a good custodian of the house.”

A custodian.

That was how we described ourselves to the man who built this house, Dick. We would be its custodians. We would care for the plants. We would keep the pecan cabinets. We would honor the logs and cherish the fireplace and tend to the mountain mint. We would be its keepers when its keeper left.

The night the house transferred hands — no keys to pass because there were none — the town held a party to salute Dick. He was 82 at the time, still spry and handsome. I helped him set up his cot in the town park, just down the hill from our house.

“You’re welcome to stay in the house, you know,” I offered.

“Eh, an old man’s gotta sleep under the stars as long as he can,” he said, rolling out his old sleeping bag. “Anyway, it’s yours now. You take good care of her.”

From then on, even though the house was ours in name and deed, it was still “Dick’s house”. We could locate ourselves in the region by summoning his name alone. More than one old-timer upon hearing which house we’d bought would chime in with their own participation in it: I built that stone wall or I built that chimney. If it wasn’t the house itself, it was Dick’s impact on their life, either: he kept me out of jail or he put me in it.

Over the years, we would continue to find objets de Dick, or as we called them, Dick-tritus. Many people asked cheekily if we’d found cocaine in the house yet. No, we’d laugh, but we did find an old sex toy, fake eyelashes, and bullets.

Every tweak we made, we considered Dick. Would he like this? Would he approve? We tried to have him come for coffee, come for dinner, but he only came once, a few months after we’d moved in. We had sanded the floors and cabinets, resealing everything to their original beauty. We had done a summer pruning and fertilizing, giving the plants a much needed boost. We had replaced the cracked black tile countertop with poured concrete. The house looked like itself, just showered and dressed.

You could see time in Dick’s eyes. He didn’t look at me as I talked, he just looked, mouth slightly agape, slightly upturned. The house itself was only 30 years old. Dick had built it in his 50s after helping to expand the small town past the avalanche field. He looked 50 again looking at the stone and log. And then, he looked relieved, resigned, a character at the end of a story.

“Well, I’ll get out of your hair.”

We couldn’t get him to stay, and we were never able to get him to come back. Friends of his would tell us it was too hard. It hurt too much to come back to this valley of snow and no longer belong to it. We were the custodians now. He had chosen us, and that was that. When I heard his son had passed, I sent him an envelope full of the mountain mint from the front steps.

I saw him once more, at a celebration in the big town over the ridge. A friend of his joked, “he really conned you into that house. All it does is snow and blow up there.” Dick laughed. “Oh, no, no. We don’t need her to go suing me now,” he laughed. He looked at me, “do you feel conned?”

“I feel lucky,” I said.

On Christmas Eve, Dick passed away, found dead on the floor on Christmas morning. Nothing drawn out, no missed hopes in hospice. 84 is a good age to live to, you’d think, but it surprised us. On the day we’d arrived, he was 82 with two beers in his pockets headed to the ski hill. And after all, this was his house. He couldn’t die.

A day or two after Christmas, our bedroom door started to creak. Not a small creak, but a Hollywood creak, long and drawn out. Spooky in a way hinges train to be in their old age.

“It’s Dick!” I called. To be visited by him now would still suit us. We want him to know this home he built is still a home — to dogs, to plants, to mischief. Every kitchen drawer I pull, he pulled before me. The stairs that ache beneath my feet, they learned it from him. The beams that hold us tight, they held him first. We are this home’s keepers, and whether we are keeping it for our son or keeping it for some other starry-eyed alpine junkies, our promise remains the same: keep the plants alive, keep the logs unpainted, and keep what makes it special.

Another neighbor laughed when I described some of the maintenance issues we were facing with faulty pipes and shabbily built chimney columns. “It was built by convicts,” he told us with a smile. And sure, some favors owed to the old defense attorney were paid in labor, but it was more than convicts: it was conviction. This was Dick’s dream — just one we happened to share. A place that required care, a home that took effort to live in.

When I look back at the photos we took when first seeing the home, I remember how many people called it a can of worms. But it’s sturdy, settled into the hillside with no wolf that could blow it down. The cracks are more like scars, more map than key. Pulling out the newspaper from between the logs to fill the space with caulk isn’t altering the house for any gain other than heat.

We make sure she stands tall, she makes sure we rest easy. That is the gift to the custodians.

We often expect things to serve us, a one-way street, rather than to also be in service in return. How many people do you know clean their washing machines once a month? Or take apart their own dishwashers to clean the filters? How many people do you know dry clean, or even buy clothes that require it? How many people do you know, when looking for a home, want one where they would be required to chop wood in order to keep it at a reasonable temperature? How many people do you know thrive on being inconvenienced?

That’s how culture has categorized it. Every hardship is something that could be made easier, more convenient. Convenience might not be in direct opposition to custodianship, but it certainly isn’t in service of it. When we say, “make this easier for me,” we are not also saying, “let me put my heart and soul into it.”

Even if we were to turn, in spirit and in agenda, toward flipping this house, it would still be made of logs. It would still be difficult to insure, difficult to insulate. It would still be inconvenient. You would be hard-tried to millennial-gray a house made entirely of wood.

People often move to the mountains, to cabins in the woods, for a slower life, not realizing life is slower because you can’t do things quickly. You can’t run this there, then drop this, then send this off, and finish that because you are still outside chopping wood for the storm you see down valley. You are still shoveling the drive. You are still scrapping together meals because you’re not going to the market for another three days. You are inconvenienced. Cold hands, sweat on the brow, wear on the muscles, and deeply, deeply inconvenienced.

The effort to care for this house built by convicts is greatly outweighed by its whimsy, its history, its very presence in this valley. The effort to care for a can of worms is nothing compared to the fish you catch with it.

When I look up from my perch in front of the fireplace, I see many of the plants Dick left us. He would only sell us the house if we promised to care for the plants. The epiphyllum, the asparagus, the hoya, the spider plant, the philodendron tree, the geraniums, the aloes, and the monster monstera. They knew Dick better than we did, and their foliage is a testament to the care he put into them. Every week, we go plant to plant to check the soil, to water, to fertilize, to care. We are their keepers, too. It takes an hour to water them all. There is no magical gray water system piped through the house. We fill the watering can, and go plant to plant to plant. Slowly, intentionally, as the minutes tick by, every week, every month, for every year to come.

That is what it means to care, and so that is what we do.

Does this make me a romantic?

I mean, I hope so. I hope this makes me someone who researches their native plants and painstakingly works to revive them. I hope this makes me someone whose pantry is deep with beans. I hope this makes me someone you would call for a ride from the airport. I hope this makes me the kind of person who would only sell my house to someone if I knew they loved plants, loved logs, loved feeling alive. I hope that convenience is something reserved to make life better for everyone, not just to make it more streamlined, more isolated, more idle. I hope that every inconvenience I have stays lined with the grit that I get to do it, that I can do it, that the doing is the good part. And I hope one day, when I’ve built a home and a reputation and seen that it’ll be well taken care of, that I die quickly, suddenly, collapsing to the floor. That I was a custodian to my own life, and all the things in it, to the very end.

Rest in reverie, Roadhawg.

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But does it have character? - #31