Room with a view

When we first bought our place many of our new neighbors would visit to introduce themselves and reminisce about their memories about this farm.  Apparently everyone had some sort of connection to our new home and the stories they shared were universally happy ones. This gave us some hope that there was an innate goodness to this place and the people who occupied it before us, and would somehow rub off on our lives. (We were really young, dead broke and idealistic enough to suppress fears of where the next mortgage payment was coming from. We needed all the hope we could get.)

One of the most memorable stories, which varied in detail depending on the teller, was that whenever Bower Shields, the head of the household, had an extra $25 he would have someone with an aptitude for carpentry come over and do a little work. These projects often involved a chain saw since the house is log and incredibly stingy when yielding a square corner or level surface.  That’s probably the reason no one was willing to put more than $25 worth of work into this house at one time, because they’d go stark raving mad trying to fit a ninety degree angle into an opening that was essentially a trapezoid with parabolic tendencies.  (Before the mathematicians get on my case for mixing metaphors you have to actually live in this house to understand that there is no geometric theory to explain how this house was built – Pythagoras be damned.)

We have continued in this tradition of incremental renovation, although the $25 dollar theory of casual spending has been inflated dramatically.  The unfortunate part for me, as the head carpenter, is that I don’t have the luxury of packing up my tool bag when the spending limit has been met. I am sentenced to finish the job no matter how cubist the final outcome or where I have misplaced my sanity. (I often regain my senses in a pile of sawdust that is also concealing the hammer I lost sometime in 1987.)  Sometimes I feel doomed to roll this boulder up a hill for eternity until at some point it will mercifully roll back and put me out of my misery.  This renovation process has been going on for so long that this fall I revisited one of the first projects that initiated me into the alternate universe of non-Euclidean geometry where two parallel lines do actually meet and bite you in the ass. I am replacing the upstairs windows for the second time in 25 years and I have no one to blame for the bizarre building methods used on the original project because I did it. It took two days to decide how to place a perfectly square object into a space that seemed to posses an extra dimension.  Quite honestly, the General Theory fo Relativity is easier to understand than trying to trim a window on a 200 year old log house.

Of course, going beyond my $25 limit has become routine over the years, as is misplacing my hammer. Losing it is probably an unconscious defense mechanism; otherwise I’d be compelled to use it on myself when solutions to a problem are not as comfortably obvious as I would hope them to be.   But hope was what sustained us when this place opened up its arms to us as the next occupants of a home that offered an intransigent perfection that resisted the onslaught of generations of carpenters who eventually succumbed to blissful madness when they realized that the world is not square, or plumb, or level.  It’s a lot more interesting and complicated than that, and without doubt, is the source of our ability as humans to spontaneously create new and wonderful languages when that hammer we were just using just vanishes without a trace