I have this fascination with houses.
It might have originated with my grandparent’s old homestead. Peeling wallpaper, bare wire bulbs, and push-button switches, it was an old, old structure with no air conditioning, or plumbing for that matter, but it had a tin roof that thundered under a heavy deluge and huge double-hung windows that rippled in the evening light.
My grandparents moved from that one to a much smaller frame farmhouse with indoor plumbing and a window unit, but no functional kitchen sink until I installed one nearly twenty years later. That homestead still figures in some of the stories that flow from my fingertips.
But the one I want to discuss today was about two hundred yards from my grandparent’s place, slumped in the middle of a washout pasture. With nary a drop of paint on the outside, the nine-hundred square foot (and that’s a guess) house was abandoned probably ten years before I hit the ground.
I was told one an old bachelor uncle I never met was the last inhabitant, but he was an influence on my life, and ultimately, my writing. From the looks of the interior, he one day picked up, packed up what he wanted, and walked away, leaving a life unremembered.
When we were kids, my cousin and I often visited that former residence that could have been the set for a slasher movie. Four long-dead trees reached skeletal arms into the air not far from the structure. They’d provided shade when he lived there, and were likely planted by the long-forgotten builders.
Two others had fallen across what was once a main dirt road leading from Arthur City to Chicota, Texas, and had flanked the house. The state built a new creek bridge and re-routed what was to become Highway 197, leaving the old dirt trace to fade into obscurity.
Sad, because the house under discussion and another unpainted domicile belonging to my blind great-great aunt Becky faced that same track, as well as the Assembly of God Church.
NOTE: After the re-route, the men of that small community engineered a way to lift the church and turn it 45-degrees to face a different oil road. To me, fascinating.
I loved to visit that great-uncle’s house that smelled of dirt dauber’s nests and ancient mouse droppings. The door was gone, as well as the windows on either side, likely salvaged for another build somewhere, giving the illusion of a blank, wide-eyed expression of open-mouthed shock.
The porch sagged, and inside, the bare, warped floors undulated like the surface of the ocean,. The rusty sheet-iron roof bent and curled toward the sky, loose sheets creaking in the wind that was responsible for its eventual demise.
It had a kitchen with one counter and two holes in the surface to hold dishpans. The doorless cabinets still held dishes and bowls. Dust-covered utensils on crusted plates were evidence that he’d eaten and left. A rusty iron bedstead with a frazzled cotton mattress took up the lone bedroom floor. Straight-back wooden chairs with cane seats sat in the silent living room, roosts for birds that spend the nights there.
As adventurous kids, Cousin and I often crept through the dead house in silence, looking at the remnants of life. An old suit coat lay tossed in one corner, a bed for stray dogs or coyotes. A pair of work pants hung on a nail driven into the bedroom door where he left them.
After poking around without touching a thing, we always walked out onto the rotting porch to look toward the south. Two gullies extended from the yard at an angle of embrace. They would eventually erode all the way to the structure itself. One was full of tin cans, glass, and whatever refuse he had no use for. It was his version of a landfill.
I was grown and married the last time I visited the house. Defying the odds, it was still standing, though slumped and completely worn out. The pants still hung behind the door, thought the chewed coat was nothing more than a few fibers. A rat snake had taken up residence in the now floorless kitchen, and slithered away when I stood in the door and consider my own memories, and possibly what Uncle had seen.
It’s gone now, bulldozed over for a new build thrown up with little or no character.
That old house somehow took up space in my psyche, and I’d like to think it eventually had something to do with my college career in architecture.
It’s there in dreams, and daydreams, and I can’t tell you why.
It was a dead house that meant nothing to me, but somehow influenced my life and writing.
Is there some special thing or place that still haunts you, as this former home does me?
Thanks for this post. I felt like I was right there, seeing it all for myself. You evidenced the powerful effects of description in writing.
While I don’t have a fascination with houses, per se, a few memories stand out. Growing up we didn’t have much money–a family of 7 living in a small 2 bedroom house (had a camper trailer to one side for us girls to sleep in). Lived in a very rural area. About 4-5 miles down the road a very long driveway led to a great big two story white house–I don’t know how many square feet but it looked like a governor’s mansion it was so big. I always wondered what it would be like to live in that big a space.
Sense of place is important to me in writing and reading. I realize in today’s attention deficit society people don’t like lengthy description, but to me evoking a strong sense of place is a powerful way to communicate in writing. This is a skill I’m still developing.
It’s fascinating to consider what influenced us as kids. I didn’t mention my parents and us two boys lived in a 950′ frame house in old east Dallas. I didn’t have a qualm when we sold it, but my grandparent’s place still comes up in dreams each month.
Thanks for seeing that old place in your mind. I hope it influences YOU in some future way.
Keep developing that descriptive skill. If you keep at it long enough, literary tastes may circle back to lengthy romantic opening passages.
“In the days when the spinning–wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread–lace, had their toy spinning–wheels of polished oak—there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country–folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. The shepherd’s dog barked fiercely when one of these alien–looking men appeared on the upland, dark against the early winter sunset; for what dog likes a figure bent under a heavy bag?”
Sound familir?
Or even familiar?
It sounded familiar but I still had to look it up…Silas Marner by George Eliot. I wasn’t required to read literary fiction in school and it’s a shame!
“Silas Marner” was required in 10th grade English. Not bad. Lately, they required “The Catcher in the Rye,” which was mostly disliked, since it’s not a book for kids, it’s about a kid. How many HS students have lost anyone? Almost none, fortunately, but to understand Holden, you have to understand grief. That word doesn’t even appear in the Cliff’s Notes.
Rev, your setting description made me wonder who the man was, why he left, what he did after he left? Was his life better or worse? Did he meet someone with whom he made a home? Did he wind up in a ditch, dying alone? Or surrounded by a new family?
A place may spark interest but the characters who live there put my writer’s imagination in overdrive.
And I can’t answer one of those questions, because no one ever talked about him. I’m afraid he simply faded away as many of those old Depression survivors did, but I hope he found some way to die happy.
Those are the things we pondered while prowling through that old place.
There’s very little pondering, these days. Perhaps it is lost art.
The house I grew up in. Seven of us lived in a two-bedroom house w/one bathroom. My dad painted houses for a living. We were dirt poor, but my mom once said she read an article in the paper that explained that people with our income lived below the poverty line. She said she didn’t know we were poor. When you grow up with nothing it seems normal. We used pliers to turn the gas stove on and a screw driver to open the refrigerator with the broken handle. We were renters, but my parents painted, hung wallpaper, and laid new linoleum and took the cost out of the rent. My sister and I slept in the unfinished attic that had no heat so we took a hot water bottle to bed with us in winter. No AC either, so we went to bed with our hair wet in the summer and stretched out in front of a fan in the window until my dad turned off the fan before he went to bed because the electrical wiring was bad, and he was afraid of a fire. We had a huge backyard so my parents planted a garden that helped feed us. My mother canned everything she could to get us through the winter when my dad was out of work. I can still smell the tomatoes boiling in a big pot on the stove and feel the hot air that made sweat run down my face. So much of who I am now was formed in that house with the gas heaters where we laid the clothes frozen stiff on the clotheslines in the winter because we didn’t have a drier. I’m one of the few people my age I know who has used a wringer wash machine and a treadle sewing machine. All this helps inform my stories.
You just described much of my childhood. All those experiences made us who we are today, just as the Great Depression forged the Greatest Generation that was able to survive WWII. We all learn by looking back and learning from their experiences.
As a new writer, very new writer, I am constantly told: don’t describe, use dialog, etc, etc… describing is an infodump and don’t do it. But I was totally immersed in your description of the house and surroundings. As BJ Jackson said, I was right there! You have given me hope that some people out there appreciate “descriptions” to be drawn into a place and a story.
Thank you
I’m glad you were there with me.
We shouldn’t info dump in a novel, but the subject of this discussion was the house itself in about 900 or so words. If I’d been using it in a manuscript, there would have been dialogue to assist, and add richness.
Thanks for commenting, and I hope this little discussion helped.
My family vacationed in Indian Lake, New York. It was a wonderful experience for a child and the old lodge we stayed at had formerly been owned by my great grandfather Peckham. I lived in the Adirondacks for a while working as a mill hand until my marriage fell apart, but the memories of the region are with me. They form the backdrop for most of my short stories and every time I start to write I remember something different about the area and my time there.
However, the scenes are about what was, not what it is today, overrun with wealthy refugees from the strip city that runs from Portland Maine to Washington DC amnd beyond.
I used this sentence several weeks ago. Life is a collection of memories. They force their way into our work without conscious thought. We should just learn to build on them in our own ways.
The places that dwell in my imagination are amalgams of places I’ve lived or worked at. My Fir Grove Library of the 1980s is a combination of several Carnegie Libraries I’ve known, as well as two libraries I worked for at many years which were built, respectively, in the late 1950s and the early 1970s. Linoleum floors, book shelves and card catalog cabinets that dominate the main room, the cluttered work room with its jumble of shelves and desks piled with papers, books, tape dispensers, index cards.
In some ways, imagination is memory envisioned anew, and even more so, possibilities borne from what we’ve seen.
My favorite job was working at the Casa View Public Library in Dallas. It is a fond memory that brings me comfort. I’d work at one again, but I’m afraid I’d still be inclined to find a corner to read, instead of shelve.
When analyzing dreams, structures (usually houses) often stand for the self or the soul. While being treated for old trauma, I had several dreams of being in a home under reconstruction. Perhaps houses resonate with our own interior metaphor. We look at one or imagine one and feel: “That’s me!”
That makes a lot of sense. I can write ten thousand words right now about two recurring dreams of houses. They almost feel comfortable now…
Do it!
I remember the summer before the first grade when backhoes and ditch witches rolled onto our gravel road and dug trenches to lay sewer lines. Until then, we’d had not indoor plumbing. Us kids gathered to watch them all day and as soon as the workers left, we played in the trenches that were over our heads. It was a glorious summer…and really nice after it was all said and one to not have to make a trip in the dead of night to the outhouse.
Outhouses are still a necessity in some places like campgrounds, but I prefer indoor plumbing for sure. You should read my friend, Sandra Brannan’s excellent book titled Noah’s Rainy Day that features an outhouse.
Sometimes I wonder how I can write at all. My parents had a loving relationship, married for over 70 years. We weren’t rich, but we lived in a middle-class neighborhood in a quadruplex in Los Angeles. My parents worked to make sure we never knew money was tight, that we could go to the zoo in Griffith Park or to Travel Town, but never got to ride the merry-go-round or train. We just accepted our parents’ ‘not today’ and didn’t realize it was because we did the free things, not things that cost money.
I had a fine childhood, too. My parents never left us wanting for love or physical things, and vacations were always around the corner. That’s why I love to travel today. We just got back from France with the Gilstrap and it was a wonderful trip.