In a Vacant House: Wilding with Jen

Ever see two dogs running loose, getting into trouble? It really takes two. Tongues lolling, tails high, they go looking for adventure. A dog on its own just isn't as inquisitive or fearless. When it comes to going through old houses, I'm definitely a dog. I'm not a fearful person; not given to the heebie-jeebies. I just want to have someone with me. Maybe it's to share the fun and amazement. Maybe it's for that little boost through the open window. Maybe it is a little spooky to go through a vacant house alone. It's a little spooky to go through this one with someone else!

I had a feeling my dear friend Jen would be up for some adventure. I wanted to show her one of my favorite houses. I hadn't been inside it since James came to see me, several years ago. I remember what fun it had been to finally see the inside of a house I'd wondered about for years! I knew there'd be neat stuff in there. She was admiring the house and had noted the open window. "I don't suppose you'd want to climb in there with me, would you?" I asked. "Hell yeah!" Jen answered, and we were off and wilding. 

Carpet was Jen's innovation, after I ripped my good lined trousers on a nail. That is a very small window to fit through. That's another reason to have a friend along--to help you pull your leg up and through!  

 

 First thing we saw was a mouse nest, which had once been sandwiched in between wallpaper and wall. Oops.  There was some funky wallpaper going down in this house.

 

Like I said, it was a little spooky from the inside. I've photographed this ancient Hydrangea arborescens from the outside so many times. Now here it is, in winter plumage, from the dark musty inside.

As it was in summer 2016, when Chet was with me. Sweet memories of giving him a cold drink from the well each time we came there. I loved running there with him. I've really only just gotten used to going there without him.

2014. Hydrangea and window behind. He's already so gray. 

Onward. We're in an old house, not hunkered down in the sweet July grass outside it.

I'm diggin' the little framed placard, and the fact that someone long ago rubbed the dirty glass to see what it said. I finished the job with a licked finger.

For YOU, MOTHER.

May the sun smile through your window

From out the skies of blue

Upon the world's sweetest creation

"Mothers just like you."

I think card verse has gotten better with time. I liked thinking, though, that in this house had lived a mother someone thought so well of.

 

Shaving stuff--a straight razor, Palmolive Lather Soap. Tums, $.30. And Spirits of Turpentine. People put stuff like that on their skin. Not me, not ever!

 

I looked at the massive old fridge with its supercool funky logo and said, "I bet if you could plug this thing in it would still run. Probably drive you out of the room with noise, but it'd work." Which is more than I can say of the three refrigerators that have died on me in the last 24 years. When I was a kid, you had the same fridge/freezer your entire life. No more. Planned obsolescence and crappy materials are the name of the game now. This thing is built like a dang battleship. You could go over Niagara in this refrigerator. I mean, if you wanted to. 

In the corner of the kitchen is a secret.

It's a cabinet that stays almost closed. The bottom shelf is a tumble of cutlery (I can't really call it silverware). There's a jar of washers. Oh, so many washers. My dad saved washers. Sadly, I am of the cohort that barely knows what washers are for, and rarely ever deploys them.

 

 On the second shelf are some little dishes and cups.

 

On the third shelf are some more washers and cotter pins. So many cotter pins. Again...not something most people these days collect for later use. 

  

The green milk glass coffee mug? Straight out of my grandmother Ruigh's cabinets. That was her dishware. I'm sad that by the time I came along, the last of five, my grandmother Elnora Zickefoose had only a few more years left in her little brick bungalow in Sheffield, Iowa. I never got to go through her cabinets; ate only a few meals at her table. But oh, what a cook she was. As was my maternal grandmother Frieda Ruigh. I never expect to eat so well again. Looking back, I realize what a gift those meals were, and I'm grateful that my parents took us every summer to see our family in Iowa.

I looked hard at the cotter pin can.  Recent enough to have a barcode and be called LeCafe! Somebody tell me what year barcodes happened...On June 26, 1974, at 8:01 a.m., Sharon Buchanan used a barcode to ring up a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. Thank you, Google! So this house was occupied at least through the late 1970's, I'd say, and nosing through the Christmas letters, into the 80's. Situational awareness, my friends. More than 30 years gone from here, the inhabitants, and all this beautiful wreckage, telling of their time here.

 

On the top shelf is the best thing of all. An electric juicer (Jen thought it might be a coffee press at first and I laughed; this is definitely 8 O'Clock Coffee, ground in a can, country).  But that's not the best thing.

 

 A Carolina wren nest! It's been occupied for several years that I know of, hidden in that magic cabinet, which I mostly closed back up when I was done snooping. The parents enter the house, I'd think, through a variety of holes, and as far as I can tell they lead the babies out via the window we climbed in. That's on the other side of the house, but a trip like that is no big deal for Carolina wrens. They're brainy--spatial perception kings.  They teach their children well.

Cabinet, ready for occupancy, spring 2018.

Now for the tableaux I love so well.

That massive refrigerator, and some boots and a barrel and bucket and stool...oh my gosh. Andrew Wyeth, bar the door.

I'm always trying to get people to click on the photos in my blog to see them large and in focus. Not going to tell you what this letter says. Trust me, it's worth reading. The things you pick out of a pile of Christmas cards from the mid 1980's! And while you're at it, run through and appreciate the other photos at full size, please and thank you.

Tools on the far kitchen wall. I have always wondered if the tools hung here when the original inhabitants lived here, or whether those went up after the house became a sort of storage unit. So I gave it some thought. I'm leaning toward the latter explanation. I mean, I love the way they look but I doubt Grandma would have allowed this in her kitchen. This looks like an after-they-left arrangement to me.

We'll just hang these here where we can git 'em. Nobody hangs a saw on the very edge of a corner they're going to walk around (the basement door). Ergo: Put up after everyone moved out.

Eek. This is what I mean by spooky.

Another look through that kitchen door before we go up the creaky freaky stairs.

The light-gathering capability of my iPhone6, my partner in all crime and adventure, is such that the darkness of this stairwell is not adequately conveyed. I went first, you know, in case BATS. Note the wall to the right.

Those are ancient logs, barely covered with plaster and wallpaper. James muses,

"That log frame is something I think about often.

What were the forests where those seedlings began?

Did they know native Americans?"

 

 LOOK at those logs!! In this humble house, forest giants, felled. When??

 

 

Pretty posies, peeling, uncovering the venerable bones of a house that's not going to fall down anytime soon.

An ironing board. Wonder and trepidation in discovery. Gratitude to be able just to look at it all.

An electric clock, strongly reminiscent of the one in my Gram Ruigh's kitchen. Again, I had the strong feeling this one would work if plugged in. "I bet it buzzes like a ...." I said to Jen. I was haunted by the thought that it was 11:10 AM when it was taken off the wall and thrown into a box, to be found over 30 years later by a harmless trespasser. Telechron brand. Sounds so Buck Rogers, doesn't it?

Creepy toys and school papers. Who will ever know?

 

Hangers, breeding in dark corners. 

Big tropical leaves were in vogue in the 1940's. I wondered why there was no color to these. Understated.

 

In a corner window sash, a hand-tatted tie for curtains, long gone. Everywhere, hand-made things that are no longer hand-done. I thought at first it was a snakeskin. Jen figured out it was a curtain tie.

 

Hunters come here. This one, I think, died on its own; the skull mostly gone as it would be had something chewed it in nature.

It was time to get back out into the sunshine. There's been so little of it this spring!

 

 

May the sun smile through your window

From out the skies of blue.

We climbed back out the pronky small window, our wilding done for the day.

The golden forsythia, the blue sky, and my favorite tableau of all were calling.

 

I saw the ghost of Chet Baker stomping across this couch, sniffing for decades-old crackers in the cushions.

The couch is losing color. Chet no longer stomps. A squirrel has taken a large divot of stuffing for its nest. The couch melts away. 

Time can only keep spooling out.

 

The log cabin stands yet.

A Tale of Two Toads

You may recall my sojourn into a Savannah antique mall in January, where I found these two charming antique ceramic toads.
I like ceramic animals that look like the animal in question. Not so crazy about the cartoony ones. Something like this, it's fine, whimsical, but it doesn't spin my globe.

 The Savannah toads, on the other hand, really had Essence of Toad about them. And so what if the big one had been broken in half and glued, and if both of them were missing toes here and there. I didn't care. They won my heart. You don't have to be in mint condition to win my heart.

I don't buy much stuff any more. There was a time when I haunted places like this and bought all kinds of funky things. Those times are gone. I don't need more stuff. But something in me needed these toads, as a souvenir of a magical trip to the South.

So I bought them and stuffed them, wrapped in paper, in my photobag for the flights home.
Transportation Safety Authority, which in the last couple of years has become my personal nemesis, saw fit to unzip my gate-checked photobag somewhere in between my relinquishing it at planeside and claiming it on landing. Of course, they failed to zip it back up. Just like they failed to zip up the secret compartment on the bottom of my backpack, letting a hand-made fabulous much beloved Michael Coleman pennywhistle slip out, forever gone.

When I got to it, the big toad was falling half out of the photobag, and the little toad was gone like the wind. I was deeply bummed. Not because it was valuable, but because I loved the pair of them and had visions of them squatting under my bonsai trees come April.
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I mulled over that missing toad for a week or two.

Then went on a Google image search for "ceramic toad."  Daggone it, I wanted a second toad.

I found this on Etsy.com, offered by a shop called The Pantages, with the following description:

 Beautiful green glazed ceramic toad or frog. Has some great patina and few chips as pictured. This is a piece that I imagine finding at my grandmas house.

Oh, yes. You, with the clunky toes and the fresh chip on your upper lip. I want you. I don't know how big you are. You look very small.

You and your warty back and well-observed hind legs will do nicely to fill the toad-hole in my heart. It haunts me to think that these photos were taken before you were mine. Ah well.

Only problem: he was a whopping (for me) $28.00. Eeek. I'd paid something like $8 for the pair of my original Savannah toads. This one was in undeniably better condition, but still... So I came back and visited him on Etsy a few times over the space of a week, and finally decided I couldn't live without him. You like something well enough to stalk it, you oughta just buy the dang thing. I learned that about the oak and slag-glass Hoosier cabinet I visited for six months. Told myself the last time I went to see it that if it wasn't gone I'd buy it on the spot. Now it houses our optics and chargers and batteries in the foyer, and I'm so glad I bought it.

There came the day that Toad arrived in the mail, in a box big enough to house a guinea pig. What the heck?? A sticker on the box announced that it was "packed full of awesome." No kidding!

Opened it and laughed out loud as I lifted the massive toad from his deep cushy wrappings. He was enormous, every bit a thirty-dolla toad, big as any Bufo marinus (cane toad)  I've seen plopping about cement sidewalks in the Neotropics. A real lunker. I wasn't expecting THAT.

I sent an enthusiastic email to the seller, Chris from Pantages. We'd been corresponding. We were both delighted to come to know each other; he checked out my blog, and will be visiting Savannah with his wife soon. May the circle be unbroken.

First thing I did was take a little watercolor to the chip on his lip, making it less noticeable.

Big Toad dwarfs the bigger toad of the Savannah pair. He's huge, more than a handful.

Now Toad watches over my orchid collection in the bedroom, and I smile every time I see him.

Sometimes you just have to go hunt down the thing that you want, listen to that little voice. I don't know why I needed Toad. I just did.