The workers pulled one aged gutter after another off of our house and odds and ends from days long gone spilled out of the eaves. The Monopoly board was crusted with mold and the slat boards imprinted with the Breakstone’s cream cheese were relics from an era when dairy products were delivered daily on doorsteps.
Homes, especially old ones, are repositories for things lost and sometimes secreted away in as much as they are places where people live life with laughter, sorrow and all things mundane and monumental that define life.
Our home was built in the 19th century and it has a subtle but forceful way of reminding us that our tenure in it is temporary, and that we are but the latest in a long line of mortals who have dwelled within its walls.
Abandoned knob and tube wiring terminals nailed here and there in basement and attic corners offer hints about the house’s history. The horse-hair plaster walls and calcimine-coated ceilings have grudgingly given way to our exertions and efforts aimed at beautifying our living space. In the process of scraping, sanding and painting we have uncovered some odd finds hidden from sight until we embarked on energetic but amateurish excursions into home repair.
A long-dismantled staircase cast its ghostly outline on a bedroom wall and a giant plaster rectangle hinted where a door may once have been located. The big windows with their sash weights and pulleys are a constant battle with my wife and I cursing and sweating as we struggle to make the windows open and close smoothly.
You can almost hear the house laughing softly and declaiming the exertions of mere mortals making their mark on a structure that has seen generations come and go.
Our strangest discovery came when we renovated an upstairs bedroom and found a hidden window. Daphne du Maurier would have appreciated the way a floor-to-ceiling bookcase neatly blocked the alcove where the window is located. But she would have been puzzled by the decision on the part of previous owners to cover the window with aluminum siding.
One of my in-laws walked into a closet in our basement last Sunday and announced with the confidence of someone skilled in the plumbing arts, “This used to be a bathroom.” He pointed out the remains of pipes in a corner of the closet where a toilet was once located.
Our garage has a loft with a trap door big enough to toss a hay bale through and the long iron bar mounted to the garage ceiling is the source of ongoing debate concerning its origin. I maintain the bar is a hose-mount designed to make car washing easier. Others say it was devised to allow horses get exercise by walking in a circle.
The contractor we paid to rebuild the garage foundation uncovered a cellar with small rooms we never knew existed. If stairs ever descended into the garage cellar, they were removed long before we moved into the house.
When I was 10, my family moved from one state to another and into a house that in multiple and frightening ways resisted our presence.
A sound sleeper for years, my mother awoke screaming one night and swore she saw a man who was not my father standing in the bedroom doorway. My brother saw the face of a classmate in his second-floor bedroom window on the same night the girl was seriously injured in a bicycle accident. I found snake skins way too often in corners of the yard and my father was so unsettled by the sound of the front door slamming on a windless summer day when no one else was home that he reached for the pistol he kept in his desk drawer and went in search of a phantom intruder.
Ghosts and hauntings are the stuff of fiction. But I can’t completely discount the notion that homes from year to year, decade to decade, century to century, don’t retain a presence or penumbra, if you will, left behind by past inhabitants. Do the ghost of dwellers past vex our efforts to imprint our stamp on an old home, or is it the house itself seeking to impede us?
We’re probably better off not knowing the answer. But over time I find myself pausing in my front hallway or on the sidewalk looking up at our house and admiring how it has endured a century-plus of human habitation with forbearance and a few secrets still well hidden.