I could tell from Kate’s face when she’d found her choice of motivation, a certainty as clear as love at first sight. Her eyes focused; her mouth set in an expression so grown-up it took me aback.
We hefted our tools, shouted into the air, and heaved. The walls exploded in a glory of white. We kept going. The world seemed made of noise—deeply pitched thuds, hammers hitting home, hoots and bellows. We paused, gasping and laughing. I looked over and saw my son, hammer raised.
“This one’s mine,” he said, pointing to the wall in front of him, and grinned.
* * *
—
I FIGURED THE CHILDREN would last five minutes; I figured I would last five minutes. The sledgehammer in my hand was heavy. Each time it made contact, shock waves rolled down my arms and legs, a visceral reminder that I had a body, muscles, a life in the physical world. As I pounded, my lungs pushing the air through me like bellows, my thoughts went deeper, subterranean. I was ten years old, stretching my newly long legs, flying along the school track and finishing in a rush of joy—then watching as the boys I’d beaten shunned me, one by one. I remembered biking as a teenager, a car coming up, pushing me off the road, the young men leaning out the windows, their faces wide, greedy. I remembered the feel of my sixty-five-year-old college mentor’s thick tongue as he stuck it into my mouth. The advice I was given afterward by a well-meaning older woman: to confront him but to say perhaps I had been mistaken, that this is what I thought had happened, and if it had happened, what I would do. Putting him on notice while allowing him an out. A tightrope of compromise—dependent upon my fallibility. As if that saliva-soaked moment could ever be mistaken. As if his reputation were the only one that mattered.
My sledgehammer crashed into the wall, and a huge chunk of plaster went flying. The next hit cracked a fault line across the wall. Lift. Slam. I could feel parts of me, hidden, hardened, almost calcified, breaking off and working their way out. I kept going, my muscles stretching, bones grinding. The work demanded deep, heavy breaths; I grabbed air through my dust mask and expelled it in short, hot bursts. Lift. Slam.
Ten minutes later the wall was gone. Gone. Only the studs left behind.
Yes, I thought.
* * *
—
PANTING, I RAISED MY goggles and looked around.
Across the landing, Ben was swinging his sledgehammer in a smooth, practiced rhythm. Ry’s wall was half-destroyed, and Rebecca was matching him heft for heft. On a board positioned some five feet above the stairs, Kate stood, pounding at the plaster near the ceiling. Beneath the force of her blows, the wall was crumbling.
I paused to catch my breath and watch my daughter as she worked—our girl, whose soul is lit by fireworks, who fights like a warrior against whatever seeks to hold her back, including me. Watching the force behind her blows, the sheer determination, I could see that while I was the one who’d wanted to be a pioneer as a child, it was my daughter who would have thrived in that environment. Of all of us, it was she who would have had the force of character to build a house out of a forest or get a wagon over a roadless mountain. And it was she who would have the strength to face what had bent my spirit when I was young, if I didn’t stifle hers first. If I could figure out which of my boundaries were truly necessary for her safety, and which were like the wings of the ornament angels—hinting at future flight while delivering only a lesson in gravity.
Standing there with a sledgehammer in my hand, I understood that this was the first time that we had truly called upon all of Kate’s strength of both mind and body, used its full potential, been grateful for the gift—and her pioneer’s heart would know that. She could take that feeling and let it live in her muscles, where anger had been. Maybe we all could.
Our daughter’s long, strong arms lifted and smashed her hammer into the wall, letting out all she held inside her safe and regulated life, claiming her role in our future. I had never seen her look so beautiful.
THE HEARTH
To the English, to remove the fire-place from the home would be like removing the soul from the body.
—Hermann Muthesius
OF ALL THE PARTS of a house, perhaps the hearth is the most symbolic. Its history goes back to the very beginning of shelter, which was created as a way to protect precious fire as much as the people who gathered around it. When Richard Weston wrote the book 100 Ideas That Changed Architecture, his choice for number one was the hearth. In Latin, the word for hearth is focus, and even now, in our era of radiant flooring and central heat, a typical American child’s drawing of a house will include—along with its peaked roof, single door, and two windows—a chimney.
The truth is, the fireplace as a heat source was outclassed in the early 1740s with the invention of the Franklin stove. But we don’t seem to care. Even Frank Lloyd Wright, that disrupter of the architectural status quo, still tended to center his houses on a chimney, and in the course of his career he designed more than a thousand fireplaces. When I was doing real estate over half a century later, I found my clients designating a fireplace on their list of “needs” more often than “wants,” even in a metropolitan area that routinely banned burning due to air quality concerns. A fireplace means home.
And now Ben and I were going to get rid of ours. It was a practical, rather than aesthetic, choice—still, the thought of destroying our chimney broke my heart. I kept thinking of the person who had spent all those hours making the designs in its stones, a story winding thirty feet up to a heart at the top. Our equivalent of petroglyphs.
If only the person who had built the foundation underneath, and the owners, who were supposed to maintain it, had been so careful. Gravity will always win, and as the foundation had weakened, the chimney had become our personal Leaning Tower of Pisa, its massive weight pulling the house along with it.
It was an untenable situation, but removing it raised the question: What is a home without a fireplace?
* * *
—
BEFORE CHIMNEYS WERE INVENTED in the twelfth century, fires were located in the middle of what was often a one-room dwelling, the smoke rising up to a hole in the roof, fumigating the storage loft above. The smoke was helpful in some ways—it helped preserve meat, and discouraged insects and birds from taking up residence in thatched roofs—but it limited houses to one story. The ground floor was smoky enough, thank you very much.
The invention of the first chimney was nothing short of an architectural miracle, but as with many inventions, this one had unintended social consequences. The ability to locate a fireplace on a wall cleared the air, but it also meant buildings were no longer restricted to one floor, and as they rose, the dynamic within them changed. The early homes had been egalitarian by necessity—family, servants, and often even animals cohabitating in one room. With the possibility of separated living areas, however, classes divided along with the space. The homeowners moved upstairs, and as Bill Bryson writes in At Home, “Servants stopped being part of the family and became, well, servants.” Personal space was suddenly a concept for the wealthy, and “soon,” Bryson writes, “it wasn’t merely sufficient to live apart from one’s inferiors; one had to have time apart from one’s equals, too.” It’s funny, or not, to think that the origin of our modern-day demand to “give me some space” had its origins in a wholehearted desire to quite literally breathe freely.
Those early two- and three-story houses were drafty and cold, however—and the reality was that the old-style hearth had produced more warmth. For those other than the truly wealthy, who could afford to heat several rooms, the kitchen fireplace continued as the place to gather—until modern central heating was invented in the 1890s and then became a more affordable option in the United States in the 1920s.
Central heating continued the social trajectory that chimneys had begun, scattering families even further, into personal spaces with doors that shut. Later, television would offer its own reason for families to gather, but then technology would disrupt it all again with
the invention of personal computers and smartphones. Now the glow most of us are drawn to comes from small screens held in our hands.
And yet there is a part of us that still longs for that feeling of togetherness, and a hearth is the symbol of an earlier time when family members gathered around a fire that held a dangerous world at bay. Inside its warmth and light, we are safe. The ability to keep it burning gives us a feeling of competence. In the end, we are all Neanderthals, thrilled by the miracle of fire.
* * *
—
BEN AND I HAD run the numbers over and over, and saving the chimney was impossible. The initial estimates for the foundation alone were just short of terrifying, and the engineer was still figuring out how to get around the issue of the fill dirt. We knew those early numbers would only rise.
And money was becoming a major issue. Back when we were in the process of buying the house, all the banks had refused to give us a loan, given the state of the foundation and roof. They’d told us to come back later, when those items were done—as if that giant middle step were a mere skip on a hopscotch court. But by that point, we were emotionally committed. After half a year of negotiations, we were damned if we were going to let someone else have our house.
We’d had one other option: our retirement fund. It consisted almost entirely of a high-tech stock we’d bought on a suggestion from a friend. The stock had proved to be an astonishing investment, vaulting from pennies to dollars, like Jack’s beanstalk heading for the sky. It’d seemed foolhardy to sell it, and yet we had, riding the wave of emotion. But that decision left us with no cushion for mistakes, no future except for this crumbling house. And while that initial leap had been exhilarating, the stress was starting to show, each new estimate from George ratcheting it higher.
So the chimney had to go, and we had to be the ones to do it, because our labor was free—a simple mathematical equation. Except that what most people tend to forget is that math is done by humans, and humans are rarely simple.
* * *
—
FOR ALMOST SIX WEEKS, we’d worked weekends as a family, demoing the plaster and lath. Increasingly, as the deadline approached and the number of remaining walls stayed stubbornly high, we’d added weekdays for Ben and me, taking turns while the other parent stayed in Seattle with the kids. Ben and I would pass each other at the car door.
“I left dinner in the fridge,” I’d say, heading toward the ferry.
“There’s two walls left in the living room, but I got the dining room done,” he’d reply.
In an ironic way, it was the living incarnation of our original vision of parenting—the two of us as equals, passing the baton of our children back and forth. Except it wasn’t. What we were handing off was a house, and like cleaning out the trash, the job was more than we could do. Yet once again, we were doing it anyway, and the pressure was manifesting in quiet but persistent ways: the laundry that was stacking up, the food that increasingly came from a package. The other work, the work that made the money to run our household, was going neglected, along with the kids, whose moods swung from supportive to frustrated. Our marriage we weren’t even thinking about, in the way that two cart horses simply move forward together, grateful only that there is another animal in the harness next to them. We just have to get through this, we’d say, and put our heads down and plow ahead, blinkered to the consequences.
It was the end of March now, and we had one weekend left before our house would be lifted off the ground. So far, we’d taken out ten and half tons of plaster and lath. Now we had forty-eight hours, a thirty-five-thousand-pound chimney to demo, and a kitchen and back porch to cut from the side of the house. Oh, and we needed to pry off the bottom six feet of asbestos shingles around the entire exterior.
* * *
—
PERHAPS THE GREATEST IRONY of the whole situation was that in our search for a slower way of living, we had fallen precisely into the trap of the American work ethic. While in the 1970s, the number of hours that Americans and Europeans labored was roughly similar, that has changed dramatically in the decades since. According to a 2016 study, Americans now average 25 percent more work hours per week than Europeans—a number that increases dramatically in the tech industry that dominates Seattle. The game is a competitive one there.
Perhaps it was the influence of this culture, perhaps it was the result of our good Germanic upbringings, but Ben and I fell into this trap more easily than many. When asked “Can you…?” we always took the question literally—as in, physically, logistically, could we do whatever was asked of us? We never changed the question and asked ourselves if we wanted to do it. We simply grabbed our overstuffed calendars to see if the new obligation would fit. The bigger the challenge, the better.
When it came to my part in this dynamic, I tended to blame my mother, as children are wont to do. It was she who’d read me Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel when I was young. Written by the author of The Little House, that equally influential book of my childhood, Mike Mulligan was another protest against the influx of technology and social change. But while the little house waited patiently for someone to save it, Mike Mulligan tilted like Don Quixote at the windmill of progress. When the big, fancy machines were going to dig the hole for a brand-new building, Mike Mulligan declared that he and his steam shovel, Mary Anne, could do it in one day—an impossible feat for such an antiquated machine. And yet dig they did, through pages of illustrations depicting heroically blowing dust and dirt, with an ever-growing crowd gathering around the barriers, urging them on to victory. I’ve basically approached my life like Mike Mulligan ever since, although I doubt that was my mother’s intention.
What I always forget, however, is that when Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne finished their task—the hole square and neat and deep—Mike realized that in his haste he had forgotten to leave a ramp for Mary Anne to get out. And so Mary Anne is turned into the furnace for the building, with Mike Mulligan sitting beside the flames of her boiler, smoking a pipe. She becomes the hearth, the heart of the structure. Depending on how you interpret the scene, she is also stuck.
* * *
—
I WAS ALREADY OUT at the house when Ben and Ry arrived that Saturday morning. When I saw only two of them get out of the car, I raised an eyebrow at Ben.
“Kate wanted to stay in the city at Rebecca’s house,” he said. “She’s worked hard. I told her she could have a break. She’ll lock up the house on her way out.”
I stood there trying not to say what had jumped into my mind. But it was hard. I had an ironclad rule with myself: no child, not even a responsible almost-fourteen-year-old, was left to close up our house if an adult was not returning within a few hours. I figured that nothing too bad could happen in a couple hours. But two days? The possibilities were endless.
“Really?” I said. Apparently, I was unable to keep my part of our pact not to second-guess each other.
“Yup,” Ben said, putting on safety glasses. “She’ll be fine. I’m going to get the asbestos shingles off the kitchen. Ry, you help your mom with the chimney.”
Ry looked at me askance.
I shrugged. “Power tools, big guy,” I said.
“Can I use them?”
* * *
—
ONE OF THE THINGS that first attracted me to my husband was his sense of well-earned confidence and the feeling I got that he would always treat me as an equal. It pushed me to be a stronger person, and besides, exciting things tend to happen around someone who stretches life’s boundaries. When he applied this same attitude to our children, however, it gave me pause—and when I didn’t treat them with the same level of confidence he did, it drove him nuts.
Whether we like it or not, most parenting is heavily informed by how we were raised ourselves. In my family, we were expected to be careful, stay safe. And we were—among the five of us kids, there was not a single broken bone or arrest. We girls barely even had boyfriends.
Ben’s fami
ly was different. They believed in independence and self-reliance. When Ben was thirteen, his parents traveled to the remote jungles of New Guinea to do psychological evaluations of missionaries—leaving the kids in charge of the house for three weeks. Ben’s older brother was sixteen, his sister fourteen. There were neighbors and grandparents who looked in on them occasionally, but it was Home Alone, the early version. The fact that no one in his family sees anything unusual in this, even now when people seem to have Child Protective Services on speed dial, says something.
I can never decide if I am horrified or thrilled by that story. On the one hand, my husband has a can-do personality that is grounded in real experience, and it makes my life better every day. But there is another part of me that reacts to that story with a looping mental audiotape that basically goes, Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.
As I grew up, I took my childhood training seriously. I wore my seat belt. I never swam alone. When I traveled, I left behind any jewelry it would break my heart to lose. And then I had children, and suddenly, all my cautions were lit in neon. Those two beings were the most astonishing thing that had ever happened to me. They were life itself. When Ben would take us on hikes along steep and narrow trails, my spine went cold as I imagined what could happen to them. For me, the risk was too great.
But Ben would argue that there was a risk in either case. You risked broken bones by letting your children out of the box, but you risked something even more awful by keeping them in it. His mother had let him bike across the country when he was seventeen. He was the better for it, he always told me.
House Lessons Page 9
