it's raining and i can't garden! crap!

While we were coming back from Wenatchee we stopped in an antique store in a little town just to stretch our legs. It was a private home turned into commercial property, with all the fixtures left in place; kind of a charming way to display antiques, I thought. There was a screen door in place between the kitchen and the carport, and when that screen door clapped to behind me with that distinctive sound of zinging spring and creaking hinges, wood and wire mesh, I went back in time instantly to my grandmothers house. It made me take a breath and clasp my hands to my chest. That made the Yummy Biker rather exasperated, since we'd all rather I didn't have these sudden attacks of Victorian ladyhood, really.

It used to be that houses were built to the measure of the person building them, long before building codes and standardization of materials. Part of my present house was built like this; the original one room cabin was measured by notches on a story stick; and this story stick is still nailed to the south rafter up in the attic, over where the front door of the house used to be. That was the luck of the house, people believed. I was completely delighted to find it still there.

My grandmothers house was built the same way. My grandfather came from Finland and was a woodsman and carpenter. When he wasn't out cutting timber he did carpentry and general woodworking around town, and when he built his house he measured by the hand, finger and forearm, and also by knots on a string he kept looped in his pocket. The house he made fit him like a suit of clothes. There is not an inch of it that he did not touch. All his tools were hand tools and many of them were things he'd also made, whittled out of cherry or hammered out of iron on a small forge.

My grandmothers house was supposed to come to me, but my mother intervened, and my cousins sealed the deal, and now it belongs to the local parish instead.

It stood at the rear of a small orchard of Gravenstein apple trees which my grandmother had wound a flower garden around, with no particular logic. After my grandmother died I used to steal the key off the ring and go over to just sit on the rug or wander around from room to room. The smells were still the same, of cooking and my grandmothers perfume and old house wood. Every window had a fragrant flowering tree or shrub planted next to it, and by midsummer you were in dappled shade in every room of a house that smelled of roses and apples and grass.

It was not a large house by any means, and like my present home it had started life as a one room pioneer cabin, added onto as the family circumstances changed. The niche in the wall of the front room had once held a Murphy bed, and that was where my father was born. The kitchen had been converted to electricity only in 1965. The indoor 'facilities' had been tacked on in the 1940's while my father was overseas fighting the battle of Midway. The outdoor privy and summer kitchen still stood until the mid-1970's, when my dad tore them down to make a garden plot. Until then, you could look out our back door and see the little skinny shack with the crescent moon shape in the door, and sometimes kids who came over would beg to use it. It was full of bees and spiders and birds nests by then, but it was always something of a bragging point to say you used the old outhouse.

Unusual for the times, there was a full basement, with a section left in dirt so that mason jars of canned food could be bedded in the cool soil. The cement walls and stairs had been poured using scrap planking and a plumb bob, pail by pail.
Those were the stairs that my grandmother died on. She passed in a nursing home several years later.

All in all, it was a tight little set-up. My grandfathers craftsmanship was idiosyncratic,and downright goofy in places, but it held up beautifully well. Hell, the man planed his own window casements rather then buy them, and they are probably still keeping the wind out.

That was the highest price I ever paid for something in my life, was that house.