Many people move from house to house throughout childhood,
but not in our house. Instead we moved
room to room. And when rooms did not
accommodate our needs, we shifted walls to expand or redesign the layout of the
house. The result is an oddity of doors
and windows in unconventional places that make our house, while likely a bit unusual
to future buyers, unique and familiar.
Each room tells a story of the years spent in this childhood home in a
way no other home could.
Take for instance the room I am sleeping in now while at
home—originally a big open room my parents slept in that became my bedroom
eventually, partitioned off to create an office space and bedroom with a
doorway put through the new hallway to the adjoining wood-room room. Later the office was dismantled and now there
is a doorway from this bedroom which was my brother’s room to the next that was
originally the wood-room, later my sister’s room and is now the room Gabriel is
sleeping in. There is also the playroom
that became my parents’ room with walk-in closets, and that eventually turned
into the downstairs sitting room.
Or take the window from the kitchen to the living room. For years, my mother had envisioned a wide
“open-concept” kitchen, dining and living room area. But when my father crushed her dream with the
architectural logic of the inability to take out a supporting wall, the
open-concept idea was re-engineered.
Perhaps the wall could partially come down? No, indeed it could not. Then perhaps small windows? My father shook his head in disbelief that
became mistaken for consent. Months
passed until my mother took fate into her own hands, and armed with a
sledgehammer, knocked out the jip rock between two beams, through which she
could create a small window to poke her head to speak to guests or pass through
supplies. If I recall correctly, the
hole remained there for months despite questions from guests and it was only
framed after some good-humored jabs at my mother.
It is not only the mishmash of rooms that welcomes me. The
house is also filled with all sorts of gadgets that make it unique. You see, we came for a long lineage of
creators. My great-grandfather, Lester,
lived in a small house in Millville, NB.
When he died shortly after his wife, Sadie, he left behind a hodgepodge
of inventions for family members to decipher.
It is legend in our house that my great-grandfather invented the original
multi-bit screwdriver, but when he presented his invention to investors, they
appeared uninterested. Since he did not
get his idea patented, when the first “Picquic” multi-bit screwdriver came out,
millions of dollars went into the pockets of some other ingenious person. When
he passed many years later, we assumed a number of “inventions,” most notably a
gas-powered wood-splitter that still cuts our wood every winter.
But the wood-splitter was my great-grandfather’s. Inspired by this genius, comes a whole slew
of other inventions. There is a
motion-sensored string of tube lights that lights up momentarily when walking
up the porch steps, there was a hot water heater attached to the old woodstove
that my father installed, which both have since been removed, there are solar
panels hooked to an accutator that tracks the movement of the sun throughout
the day to maximize efficiency and thus heat the hot water in the house. The
house was primarily heated with wood heat and my father is always looking for
new small-scale power sources to take our house of the grid.
The yard has also been the colony of invention. When we were young, my father built a
playhouse that has since been extended to become his tool shed. And the tower
erected in the backyard that became a grapevine trellis. But, interestingly enough, we children, were
spurred on to create our own spaces and inventions. A slow saunter through the woods brings back
the memory of a plethora of inventions and creations of years passed.
While there are no traces left of camps we created, stumps serve
as reminders of the places they used to be.
Many areas of our natural playground are gone: the bridge across the
stream, the mound behind the playhouse that marked off the pond. With it, are
the myriad of frogs that used to live and call those waters home. Gone is the stream fed by springs bubbling
from the earth where we would muck around for hours each summer in attempts to
create water gardens. They have dried up. Gone is the cement well on which we used to
bake mud pies. The tree we used to climb
into and build forts against fell over in the winds and what remains is a stump
covered in moss.
However, the tamarack trees we used to climb and under which
I built my fire campfire, are still there.
And the playhouse, the mother of invention still stands, although
slightly remodeled and with a new addition.
With it comes its own set of memories. At first, a drive thru, serving
rubber play food and mud pies, later a frog sanctuary we tried to fill with
water and frog eggs that later dried to the floor (hence the disappearance of
the frog community and thus, the pond), as teenagers it became a spot to tan on
the black asphalt roof.
What memories we created here, and while each spring my parents
yearn to sell this house and move to the city, we all secretly hope it will
never happen. Besides the irregular
layout of the house from years of creative renovating, this house holds too
many memories, too many stashes of secret treasures hidden by our younger selves yet to be discovered by the
next generation. And with the constant
shifting of houses and homes amongst us children, having a place like this to
come back to is comforting. It holds a
history.
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