By Jefferson Weaver
As Miss Rhonda napped and I marked the halfway point home, I glanced at a longleaf pine standing solitary by a recently-turned field.
The sunset was painting the fields in that way it has in March and November, when the season is reluctantly waiting for the last of the equinoctial change to give the all-clear. Jonquils guarded the base of the old pine, flowering descendants of generations of soldiers which had flourished at a country homestead long since lost.
I remembered the house that once stood there; indeed, when Miss Rhonda and I realized we had lost nothing in the city, but were missing much in the country, I talked to the owner about buying the place.
“You don’t want that old house,” he said. “There were a few good families in it, but then I rented it to So-and-so for his migrant workers.”
Whilst I have yet to see any contagion from farmworkers—or anyone else, for that matter, at least none that couldn’t be killed with a good cleaning—the owner described how some “trashy” people had moved there later. They threw several parties most notable for the number of folks given rides by law enforcement to meet the magistrate. Then the house was boarded up, and became a draw for lusting teenagers and desperate drug users.
Brother Mike and I flagrantly broke the law one Sunday by walking through the missing door; beer cans and bottles and food wrappers were scattered about the floor. The stale smells of forgotten bacchanalia and desperation coated the heart-pine walls more thickly than the nicotine from countless cigarettes crushed on the floor. Windows and doors alike were broken and warped, and the house was a tragic, sad version of its old self.
Not long after our visit, the owner burned the old house; years later, I suppose one might still find a rusted nail or a bit of broken china or glass in a spring-plowed furrow.
I have never had much patience for people who declare, “You don’t want that old house.” My independent streak comes through—how dare anyone presume to know what I would want? Maybe someone caught up in the love of plastic convenience and upside-down mortgages that pay for six-foot TV sets and eight-nozzle showers would want an old house, but I have never stood on a sagging rotting porch but that I couldn’t see what it had been, and could be again.
This particular old house would have had a peach or apple tree in the backyard, and deep grass where a little kid could run barefoot on a summer’s day. It would have had a clothesline where colorful dresses stitched on a Singer sewing machine hung flapping beside starched white shirts. There would have to be a friendly, loyal dog, of course, since little kids need friendly, loyal dogs, and possibly an aloof cat to handle the mice that made their way from the fields.
Longleaf pine trees being what they are, the tree I saluted from the highway would have already been there—the old house was in its prime four decades ago, a comparatively short time for a longleaf. Back then there would have been hedgebushes around a small front porch, just enough to let a visitor get out of the rain before knocking on the front door.
Of course, most visitors would have gone to the side door—where Mike and I broke and entered that afternoon—across a larger, more practical porch that could hold courting teenagers, a few watermelons, and a couple of chairs for days when peas and corn needed to be prepared, but the day was too nice to waste inside. It was the kind of porch where a little kid could safely enjoy a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, play with his dog, and stomp big black spiders—all at the same time.
Such old houses are scattered here and there by the roads I travel; every year more and more of them fall victim to neglect, both benign and malignant, until the last unreasonable heir in a family dies or the land is sold or a flaming match—errant or intentional—gives the old house a Viking funeral. Once in a while, someone sees the potential in an old tenant house or a Queen Anne or craftman’s cottage and restores the home to a glory it never knew in real life.
My dear friend Linda Henry Robins fought that battle and won; members of her family thought she was crazy to attempt to restore the old homeplace. But Linda had a love for the home of her childhood, and she wouldn’t stop. Now it’s a comfortable, welcoming home, not the model of Victorian-kitsch that saves many old homes, but a true restoration of the home treasured by her family for generations. Linda’s a hero of mine for that project.
Had a few things gone differently, the old house Mike and I explored might have turned out the same way; indeed, kudzu and vines are much easier to repair than the work of vandals and ne’er-do-wells, but the cleansing, complete destruction of a structure fire hungrily devouring resin-rich pine leaves nothing for the would-be conservator.
Indeed, as we drove past the pine tree the other day, I thought to myself how the owner of that old house (himself now gone on to whatever reward awaited him) had been right. I didn’t want the old house with the grease spattered behind the rusted old range, or the cigarette burns on the floor, or the broken whiskey bottles on the counter.
I wanted the old house that still exists in a few pictures, an old house where a momma and a daddy, a chubby girl, her older brother and her baby brother posed in their Easter best. I wanted the old house where the baby boy grew up to wear overalls and a straw hat while he ran barefoot with a dog named Shep on a hot summer’s day.
No, the old farmer was right—I didn’t want the seedy, rundown party house. I wanted the house I remembered, the house it had been for my family and one or two before. A home from a time before cell phones and computers ran my life, when a car passing down a dusty road was an event and there were no worries outside of when the peaches would be ripe and whether the laundry would dry before the thunderstorm. A place where the sunset painted the fields.
I didn’t want that old house—I wanted the home it had been.
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