Saving Old Stones

We’ve visited the house several times this week, always in the evening. The workers are not there when we arrive, so it’s sort of like the house version of the Elves and the Shoemaker. One day we came and all the trash and insulation had been cleared from under the house, and the first layer of concrete blocks had been built onto the foundation footings. The next visit brought higher walls, and cutouts for the new, larger windows. Our elves, however, leave behind little piles of cigarette butts and the stray Mountain Dew bottle.

The house is still wide open and breathing. Unfortunately, the side porch (soon to be a screened porch) still carries the scent of the pack of horrible dogs who used to live there. Not pleasant. It is trapped in the old porch carpet, which will soon be tossed into the construction dumpster. I imagine it has been preserved to protect the floor during the demolition of the enormous stone grill affixed to the backside of the fireplace. Richard says he remembers it being used only once in all the years his family used the place as a weekend getaway. Who would want to cook on a screened porch?

The grill was huge — projecting five or so feet into the porch and nearly bisecting it. It is gone now. Some crowbar wielding elves have knocked it down, leaving nothing but a small square hole intended for the non-existent smoke from the grill. This will be patched up, and if it looks too discordant, we will cover it up with some art. I hope it looks terrible. I’d love to buy some art.

The fireplace is made from old stones. The original Rankin house, Willowside, was built in the late-eighteenth century and for most of its history had a separate kitchen building, with a big stone oven and stove. Richard’s uncle tore down the kitchen when our house was being built in 1960. Richard’s father rescued the stones and incorporated them into the new fireplace and chimney. He grew up eating food cooked on and in the stones, and I’m glad he saved them.

Now, he does not remember much of his life. When asked if he recalls things once central to his definition of himself — like his half-century practicing medicine — he usually answers with a flat, “No.” He does not pretend to remember anything, and is gently astonished every time when he is informed he delivered over a thousand babies. When I first knew him, he was replete with stories about his patients. He made housecalls into the 1970s, in one of a series of big black Cadillacs. He retired, reluctantly, eight years ago. He does not remember any of this.

Richard also asks him fairly often if he remembers growing up at the farm, at Willowside. He says yes, every time, without hesitation. I think he spends a lot of time there these days.

(Pictures coming when I can find my camera)

Footings

All right, I think including a dictionary definition is a lazy, trite way to write, but I’m going to do it anyway. It’s common enough in commencement speeches, and as it’s that time of year, consider it in honor of all the valedictorians across the land frantically paging through Webster’s New Collegiate or, more appropriately, dictionary.com.
The cement footings of the house have been poured. Footings are the columns, or piers, upon which rests a building’s foundation. They are very tall, or at least they would be if they were above the ground. But this is the wonderful thing about footings. You have to dig down until you reach undisturbed earth, and then you fill your hole or trench with cement. Earth is replaced with cement. It is tremendously hard work, and an enormous undertaking, and doing it wrong spells eventual disaster for a building.

The end result is not especially impressive, however, as all of a footing’s bulk is underground. The visible part of the footings do not look like a columns or a piers or walls, but rather variously-sized slabs of cement placed at regular intervals in the ground. Richard was a bit unimpressed with the footings, but I rose to their defense. The cement was still slightly damp, and looked less solid than it actually was – sort of like quicksand in Tarzan movies. I explained that if I jumped onto what appeared to be a two foot square slab, I would actually end up at the bottom of twelve feet of cement. This gave me the willies, quite honestly, but was a sufficiently vivid image, I think.

Which leads me naturally to the dictionary, specifically the Oxford English Dictionary, because in addition to definitions, pronunciations, and etymologies, the OED cites the earliest-known usage of a particular word and other illustrative passages, and these are usually my favorite part.

This post would be far too long if I included all the entries on “footing.” I must include at least a bit, because it has a long and solid history, just as it should. Not without a touch of poetry, however. Also just as it should be.

(Click on the image below for a more readable view.)

History

There is this show on HGTV called If Walls Could Talk, all about homeowners who renovate and discover interesting things in their houses or about the past owners of the houses. Caches of wartime letters, covered-up naughty frescoes, bullet holes, old files, all kinds of stuff. What I like about the show is the effect these discoveries usually have on the new homeowners. Not surprisingly, they feel connection to the house’s past and a sense of stewardship and concern for its future. Oftentimes they build display cases, or gather old papers in scrapbooks. They spend hours tracking down old records, sifting through photographs, making telephone calls. Sometimes they have postponed planned changes to the house until an unresolved part of its story can be settled. Or they build around the house’s history, leaving room for it in the new structure, as people sometimes do with trees.

This is often a well-intentioned death-blow for the tree. Its roots cannot sustain the pressures of construction and the tree slowly dies, leaving behind a gap in the new structure. I don’t know if this is the case with history.

For most of our house’s history, it was surrounded on the front (south) and west sides by a brick terrace. Richard’s father bought a huge load of fire bricks – bricks used to make the ovens to bake more bricks. In terms of bricks, these are the hardest, brickiest bricks extant. They are a sandy orange-ochre in color, with marks stamped into each one. On the west side, there was a gap in the bricks to accommodate a tree that shaded the house. When the tree died, more fire bricks were sent into the breach. I never knew the house when it was shaded by the tree. By the time I came to visit, the bricks seemed to have rediscovered new interest in their ovenly past and decided that the house was the biggest brick of all. Summer afternoons on the west side of the house were fierce.

It probably comes as no surprise to learn that I was not a fan of the fire bricks. When Richard lived there, he managed to keep the grass sprouting through the cracks at bay with regular doses of Round-up. The renters did not display the same vigilance, and until a week ago, the terrace was a hot, weedy, exhausted-looking mess. Now, the terrace is history, as they say. I cheered, because I love history. Richard, who is the historian in the family, was more circumspect. He remembered the shade.

Plans

I spent last night and much of today with the plans. I got them all together, and weeded out the old versions — the one with the courtyard and the one with the parking area in the back. The contractor (or GC, as I’ll now refer to him, because that’s the lingo I learned today — more on that later) has the real plans. I realize something he said the other day about windows in the kitchen cannot work, and it’s fairly obvious why. This makes me nervous, a bit, because shouldn’t he know that? However, he had spent the day knocking out all the old bricks from the front porch (picture of pile in the last post), so I’m prepared to not worry about it. I want to talk to him about it, though.

The plan is to build a symmetrical wing on the west side of the house. The front of the new wing will be covered parking, the rear, new living space. The house is about 2000 sq. ft. now, and will increase to a bit under 3000. The clerestory/cupola thingamajig will be over the kitchen. I wondered if it could be an observatory, but there’s really no way to get up there. Perhaps with ropes and pulleys! It’s really just for light and because the architect drew it and we thought it looked great.

I spent part of my time with the plans spread before me. I’m not terribly good with spatial stuff, so it’s taken me a bit to fix everything in my mind. I realized for the first time today that I truly understand what’s going where. And enough has been demolished that I can see what it will be. It’s starting to feel like the place it will be.

So with that in mind, I spent the rest of my time with the plans not spread before me, but in my mind. I asked a question at Readerville about induction cooktops, and a poster there very kindly sent me over to the Kitchen Forum the Kitchen Forum at Garden Web. This is where I learned about calling the contractor “GC.” Well. My questions about induction cooktops were answered pronto, and I’m well on my way to deciding that I really want soapstone counters. A worthy home for the cheese and crackers.

It’s hard to write about kitchens without sounding trite. It’s where everything happens — most of the laughing, arguing, deciding. I don’t want a shiny, showy kitchen. I want everything to work, and I want a lot of shelves, and I want a stove which will heat up and cools down quickly (unlike this which DOES NOT), and a big sink. I don’t need an AGA or a steam oven or a marble baking counter or hand-made English cabinets. The soapstone is entirely practical, of course.

Soapstone

Opening

So — Rankintown. That’s the name of the original settlement back in the far away long agos, when the Rankins came to the county. They were there long before the surrounding towns were settled and were your basic yeoman farmers — good solid Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who came down the Great Wagon Road. I’m not going to go into a lot of the area’s history. That’s Richard’s department. Plus, I want this to be more a chronicle of the progress of the house.

 

 

Anyway, the house is down to the studs, pretty much. I told Richard I can practically hear it sigh with relief. We’re tearing out all the horrors perpetrated upon the poor thing by years of hillbilly-inhabitants and their pack of miscreant dogs.

I want the house to remember its past as the scene of beautiful parties and Sunday naps. I want it to forget having its feet chewed by mongrels, and a yard strewn with old tires filled with mosquito-y water, and the sullen, humorless people it was reduced to sheltering. Now it’s standing half-bare on its hillside, with light shining through gaps in the old panelling.

 

Renovation. I know, even without checking the OED, that “new” is in there somewhere. I’ve debated whether this is renewal or rehabilitation. Of course, it’s both, but I think I’ll have to plump for “renovation.” We’re bringing the place back to life. Richard said today he hopes the new house will be a “cheese and crackers” kind of place, which was sort of brilliant. Cheese and crackers and NPR and wine on the porch and cool people walking up the hill and a blue and yellow kitchen and a screened porch with a bird book perched on the railing. Maybe a bottle tree. And a fire pit and a metal roof to keep out the wet of rain but let in the sound. And I’m certain there will be this smell — this cool damp smell of ferns and creeks and fallen trees — that will roll up the hill in the evenings and in the morning. Right now, the house is open to the breeze, which it needs.

We’re going to call it Sugahaw, which is an invented word. Sort of. Many of the old place names around here are white people’s versions of Indian words. I found a Catawba Indian lexicon online, and I made up Sugahaw from the word that meant our house. Suga like sugar. It sounds like an old place name, so I’ve pretended that I’ve invented history with my invented word. We mentioned to the architect we were thinking of using this name, but in truth we hadn’t really decided. On the first go-round of plans, however, he printed Sugahaw, and that was it for me. We had named the place. Sugahaw. And now I think of the house sighing, and the breeze blowing through its skeleton, and Sugahaw doesn’t feel invented, it feels inevitable. Like it really was there all along. Before Rankintown, before anything. Except that smell of ferns and creeks and fallen trees.