exmearden

On Earl Avenue

If we call it just a house and not a home, does it still possess a soul separate from the vagaries of mortgages, layers of paint, or crayon, or grease on the walls, busted pipes in the winter, the seepage stains that are like Mercatur projections of alien continents on whitewashed mortared walls?

Does the heart of a house exist outside any memory of the tangible moments that mark the living within? Or does the spirit of a house, soul-centered in an aging body of wood and brick and nail, pulse simply because there are lives, loves and deaths that pass through?  Perhaps an invisible, silent, tender skin of cares, of worries, of hopes, coats every moment exchanged. Coats the hallways, the rooms, the stairs, the steps leading away. In this old house on Earl Avenue.

My relationship with a certain house that has a soul has been more of a connection like that with an old childhood friend or an indirect but familiar relative. Sometimes lost, sometimes found, sometimes irritated, sometimes enjoyed.

I've been trying to find my way around telling this tale of this house for awhile now. There are layers and layers, some of which I've touched on before, some of which I've avoided delving into – even with myself, in the interior, in the back corners of memory that evoke smells, and sounds, and memories, and events...and some of those things are somehow like rotted garbage, detritus floating as  obstacles to what lies ahead for this house with a soul, a house no longer really a home, a house that has been neutered due to time and miscalculations and tragedy, and loss, and well, the inconsequence of plans not so well laid.

I could start the story in 1969. I was eleven and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. In May that year, my nephew was hit by a car in the crosswalk a block away from his house, and killed. He was five years younger than I. The house my sister and her husband lived in became a house of ghosts and so they sold.

They found a charming, though small, Tudor brick in Ballard, a Seattle neighborhood just to the west and north of downtown. Wedged in between two sister Tudors, the house was build in 1927. Carl, the builder and his wife Marge, lived in the sister brick house to the north. Carl passed somewhere late in the 1980's, and Marge moved out around three years ago, and passed away a year later. The first tomatoes fresh off the vine that I tasted were from Marge's backyard vegetable garden the summer of 1970.

This old brick. It represented stability, community – many of the neighbors that are still there and still alive, have spent upwards of 40 to 50 years there. Houses bought on the GI Bill. Generations of families continue to roll over their family house to relatives when finances allow. There is an eclectic mix of small old Tudors, Craftsman bungalows, post-WWII square one-story with basement clapboards. In the last couple of decades, an occasional rash of residential lots here and there have been purchased as tear-downs and narrow two-family townhouses have been erected on postage stamps plots barely 45 feet wide in the odd wedges of long neighborhood blocks with alleys between the backs of houses fronted on slender streets.

Stability. Sharon and Richard bought stability when they really couldn't find it anywhere else.

1969, the death of their son and then my dad in October. Sharon was pregnant with my niece, now 39, when her first son was killed. My niece was born in September, a month before our dad died. We held the shower for her daughter, my niece, in the new, old house, and then three months later, the Seattle reception for my dad's funeral. Two years later, Todd was born (a part of his story here).

Richard was a traveling salesman for an electronics company. Again, they bought stability, or tried. Through the years, my mother would get late-night calls from Sharon, asking for money so they could catch up with their mortgage, the original loan on the house was somewhere around $24,000 in 1969. I have no idea how many times over the years the house was re-mortgaged to provide funds when money was tight and commissions were low. Or how many times bills went unpaid because Richard refused to pay a bill on time when he couldn't cover the entire amount. The little office upstairs off the master bedroom, tucked into an alcove of the pitched roof over the porch, still has stacks of unopened bill envelopes yellowed with age and roughened with a silica-like dust from literally decades of negligence.

Somehow, through a multitude of means and borrowing and patchwork jobs taken by both Sharon and Richard, they hung onto the little Tudor. Never refurbished it beyond a small change in the kitchen – they borrowed funds in the late 70's, early 80's to extend the kitchen into the breakfast nook and added more cupboards. Those old houses and their small kitchens.

The scalloped apron wood work that arched under the old porcelain sink with built-in drainboards (the kind you'd hang a skirt on to hide the wastebasket and the drainpipes) was banished, and a fancier Price-Pfister double sink with a spray hose was added.

More cupboards. A Jenn-Air  convection range. A solarium window overlooking the side yard of the shared space between the southern sister Tudor. New linoleum.

That was the sum total of upgrades to the old, small dame.

Maybe I should have started this story in 2007, when the house, my sister's home for 38 years, turned its final corner as an equity bank, meant to fund an additional two years of living expenses for a widow living now on Social Security and funds from the state provided as compensation for her duties as in-home caregiver to her mid-thirties Down Syndrome son. My sister's choices and the road she traveled that year, in 2007, well, I've documented them already here. And here. And more.

But the house, with a soul, always somehow fronted as a bank; it still hinted at stability. That was an ongoing American dream in 2007. Correct? You had wealth if you owned your home. It was money in the bank. Even if the bank held the major portion of your wealth in your home in a note ransomed by high interest rates and impending adjustable payments. Strange how the word adjustable is now a euphemism for extortion.

Sharon wanted just two years. Then she would sell before the adjustment and take the equity and buy a modest condo or townhouse within a block of grocery stores and downtown Ballard. And finally find a group home for Todd. She was getting too old and too physically incapable of the strenuous chores involved in keeping up with Todd. He was growing older, too. Increasingly, as he ages, Todd exhibits frustration and anger in physical ways. Possibly the effects of depression and loss; possibly signs of early-onset Alzheimer's, which researchers are discovering in middle-aged Down Syndrome individuals at a rate higher than the greater "abled" population. The day he knocked her down in anger in late 2006 signaled a crucial need for a change. A re-adjustment of expectations about the end-game.

Just two years before the new interest-only mortgage at 11% and payments, minimum payments, at $1300 a month, would balloon to over twice that amount and then increase on some weird algorithm even I couldn't understand as I sorted through the paperwork a few weeks ago. But she thought two years would buy her some time to look for the start of a new life in her late sixties. And to determine a longer-term care outlook for Todd, finally.

The theory may have been sound enough in early 2007 when house values were still projected to increase. The desirability of a 1920's Tudor in residential Ballard, and the appearance of an ever-growing economy from constant new construction of multi-use residential/commercial structures in the nearby surrounds of Old Town Ballard buffeted Sharon's belief that she could make this work for two more years.

My sister Sharon was 69 in early March of 2007. She had worked for thirty years, the last twelve or so as a receptionist/executive assistant for a small steel fabrication company that contracts with Boeing. Never made more than $12 an hour. Then, in December of 2001, her husband, my brother-in-law, was diagnosed with kidney and bone cancer, and a rapid descent through failing chemotherapy and increasing morphine culminated in hospice by early July 2002. Sharon continued to try to work through the first few months of 2002, but due to the combined chores of monitoring my brother-in-law, and taking care of Todd, each day life became too great for her to handle and still remain employed.

She retired in April 2002. The next few months ate up the remains of the IRA she had paid into (without company matching; too small a firm), as she was too young to draw Social Security at that time, and the drain without her income (and without Dick's income – he was granted an unpaid leave of absence but his employer still covered him with insurance benefits throughout his decline, bless 'em) pretty much tapped them out.  
Dick died in mid-July 2002. The remaining IRA went to pay funeral expenses and an emergency plumbing repair on the house later that fall.

Given all of that, Sharon scraped by over the next five years – paying down her existing mortgage at that time to around $200,000 – not too bad for a house in a residential area where the median price of most residences was around $500,000 to $600,000 for the standard post WWII bungalow 3 BR, 1 to 2 BA house. Seattle suburbia was and is still expensive.

She paid off all those bills that had never fully been paid. She saved. She ratcheted up her FICO score and was so, so proud. And angry that all those years she had let Richard administer the finances. It was the one thing he would never budge on through forty years of marriage.

In 2006, Sharon took a long-needed and long-dreamed of solo vacation to San Antonio. Something about the bluebells, the RiverWalk, and the Alamo. She asked my opinion before she left on whether or not she should wear her wedding ring on vacation. I encouraged her not to, fully understanding what the underlying query meant.

By February 2007, she made the decision to remortgage, consolidate and took the plunge on a GMAC ARM, with an end-term of two years before the doubling payment. The papers were signed on March 2, 2007, finalized on April 1, 2007. On March 29, 2007 Sharon found out she had cancer. By April 26, she was dead.

My niece moved in at the end of that last month to help with Sharon's needs and get Todd out the door to work at his job at Northwest Center. She and her new husband (they married last summer) still live there; the estate is still in probate, the payments barely manageable until May 1 of this year. Those payments double to over $2700 a month on a $360,000 mortgage principal on May 1.

The mortgage is, of course, nonnegotiable. It was sold to Wells Fargo a year after Sharon signed the papers. In 2007, my sister was somehow able to qualify for the extremely dubious ARM in 2007 with no future assurance of income beyond Social Security and caregiver pay from the state. The house itself needs serious work to grow in value even in a good economy. My niece and her husband can not qualify for a renegotiated mortgage though they both work full-time, (but at $15/hour jobs) and are still in their late thirties, early forties. The house has dropped some $150,000 at this writing, bringing the current potential market value down to the amount of the mortgage my sister borrowed. Potential only, because nothing in real estate is moving there now. Three houses in the neighborhood have been on market for almost a year though prices have dropped dramatically. Soon, it will be upside down at the increased interest and nominal principal payments.

My niece will have to walk away. Does a house have a soul? Can the spirit of a house truly break?

The little Tudor has wounds – nicotine-patina walls from a two pack a day smoker; the south wall bulges, broken mortar, from the earthquake in 2001 that my sister and brother-in-law neglected to obtain FEMA funds to fix. The ceiling over the porch leaked one year in the mid-eighties, and the house was re-roofed, but no one ever replaced the drywall over the exposed beams in the ceiling of the entry. The yard is uninspiring and overgrown.

The shower pipes in the only bathroom have had plastic secured damply with duct tape across open gaping holes in the lathe and plaster behind the tiles for at least eight years now; the leak was fixed, but the black vintage ceramic tiles were never replaced.

These are battle scars and age spots in the fight for the elusive American Dream. Unhealed, now never healed, a terminal condition. This old house will be a tear-down. In a few moments now, a few days, weeks, maybe months, maybe the week when they say the market has finally bottomed out, that invisible, silent, tender skin of cares, of worries, of hopes, that coats each moment exchanged, will become memory only. Memory drowned out in the hawking calls of the auctioneer.

Does a house have a soul?

the old ways

I'll start with how my bones feel. There's an ache deep in the pocket, the socket of my left shoulder, now my right, again in my left. That pocket. I think of a billiard pocket, oddly, but the ball on the top of the humerus bone in my arm ratchets around like an 8-ball foul in the wrong pocket of my shoulder. It's an ache that has a sound. Should cartilege moan when it scratches against muscle fascia near the scapula? I think mine does. Something  wakes me at night, calcium crying softly, dreaming of movement, full range, free of pain.

(part of the Monday night TGR series on Dailykos)

Suddenly I knew that you'd have to go Your world was not mine, your eyes told me so Yet it was there I felt the crossroads of time And I wondered why.

These winter days, such a long winter, cold with snow, more months of snow consecutively than any string of December, January, February, March that I've known in fifty years in the Northwest. So my bones ache.

And, well, I think of my mother. Her superstitions and the Welsh folklore she carried with her on all days. Some might think she was humourously superstitious, but most of the time, her sayings and pronouncement were dead serious. "My bones are aching, it's going to rain", she'd say. No laughing aloud.

"Don't rock that empty rocking chair...you'd offer the Devil a seat?"

"Don't open that umbrella in the house! There will be death in this house before year's end."

"My nose itches. I wonder who's thinking about me?"

I remember spending at least some of my youth quietly worrying at a very low level about the small things, the things that would through cause and effect from my violation of a particular superstition initiate chaos, or death, or invite the Devil into the house. My mother wasn't particularly religious and lost all conscious respect of God when my father died in 1969.

The thundering waves are calling me home to you
The pounding sea is calling me home unto you

The thundering waves are calling me home to you
The pounding sea is calling me home unto you

It was His rejection, she would sometimes say. But she never let go of her superstitions. And still I subconsciously worry about walking under ladders or spilling salt.

I think of her at fifty. There must have been no prescience, no ominous glimmer that within two years her world would slide close to fracturing irreparably. That financial success, so close, meant little without her husband there to share. They worked for many years, built businesses and rented and renovated small dumpy houses into better, slightly larger houses, ran the motel, worked outside jobs, belonged to social organizations to network with other local business owners long before the verb "networking" became a modern-day action item.

They were within a year of selling their major business and beginning their dream retirement home. And then he died at 51; my mother was 52.

At fifty her bones ached. By 52, her heart was broken.

I wonder now how much her need to maintain the old Welsh superstitions carried forward generationally from my grandmother was wrapped up as a part of her control as a single parent. Some folkloric utterances became more pronounced. It may have been a curious device, a way of implying and inserting an otherworldly presence in a child's life by invoking a watchman over the behavior of errant young humans. Children so casually dismiss the gods.

It may have just been a way of tamping down whatever anger or guilt or unresolved pain lurks in the corners of a grieving lover's mind after the death of a mate.

I wasn't able to see this at eleven, or twelve, or even thirty.

Turning to go I heard you call my name,
You were like a bird in a cage spreading its wings to fly
"The old ways are lost," you sang as you flew
And I wondered why.

I carry some things forward as inheritance, as heirlooms. The superstitions? Well, not so much. I work on "putting away childish things" and I place those most of the time in my closet-hidden basket of insecurity blankets.  

Then the bones ache.  I've pocketed the ache that forever scented the aura around my mother. It's an ache that has a sound.

Something  wakes me at night, a memory trapped on earth still, crying softly, dreaming of movement, full range, free of pain.

The thundering waves are calling me home to you
The pounding sea is calling me home unto you

The thundering waves are calling me home to you
The pounding sea is calling me home unto you

JohnnyRook

His real name was Steven Kimball. But here at Daily Kos and on his own blog, Climaticide Chronicles, he was known as JohnnyRook. After a two-and-a-half-year fight against acute myeloid leukemia, he died Monday [March 2, 2009] at his home in Port Townsend, Washington. He was 53.

...excerpt from R.I.P. JohnnyRook by Meteor Blades

JohnnyRook's Port Townsend is a lovely town cornered on the eastern straits of Juan de Fuca, on Admiralty Inlet, and in the rain shadow of the Olympic mountains on the Olympic Peninsula.

You cannot imagine a lovelier place. It's a corner of earth to yearn for. Ghosts of many races and genesis from over a century ago walk with thoroughly modern mortals along Victorian streets little changed but for gift stores and ice cream shoppes (probably suffering in this economy).

So many Indian tribes once crossed the sandy tide-washed lowlands around Port Townsend seeking salmon and the trade of other Sound dwellers - Chemakum , Quilleute (Hoh), the Klallams, Quinault and the Quilcene, and the Suquamish to the south.

Salty mudflats were filled in and paved with cobblestone in the 19th century anticipating the railroad's arrival and Seattle-size boom town success. But the rails fell short. Another century, another Depression.

The Indians were constrained to reservation land in the west and south and east, and a military installation platted an officers row (Fort Worden) on prime fir-covered land around the point.

Boom receded and left the most fantastic Victorians still perched on the hill above downtown. A marvelous covey beach nests around the point where a standard coastal lighthouse fields chill winds from the Frasier valley to the north and warmer marine winds from the Pacific.

Straining eyes see Canada.

There's magic in the summertime dusk in Port Townsend, the receding day saturated in a dusty blueish-purple-coral. At this time of day-night, the spirits return, all spirits return.

A fine place from which an ecologically-minded soul can fight to save the earth, settle and finally, rest.

---

Like many, I drop in and out of Dailykos, some days spending hours; some weeks are missed entirely due to life, work, health, family, dogs, the usual crisis-centric buzz that drowns out everything.

I never took the opportunity, or delved deeply enough into the series of Johnny's posts here or on his own blog, to realize that he lived just across the Sound.

I had an image of him lately when I read his diaries and A Siegel's fine piece. A kind of a protective inner insistent visual chant, a vision of him cocooned in a nest far above the ground in the colony of his family.

I've lost a good neighbor, a thing more precious than gold.

Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago...

William Butler Yeats

Sympathy to his family, his friends, his blog community.

Peace to you, Steven.

Climaticide Chronicles
My doctor doesn't think I'm going to die today
Homage to a Hero
Powershift.org
Daily Kos Environmentalists

That mortal coil

Chapter 5

I like the day. In the past I worked most at night; that former time on my beat as a street cop, the night-set cases I was assigned after I made shield. I learned a great deal. I found the night hosts things that scrape the walls of a conscience and abrade the soul.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more. William Wordsworth Intimations on Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

Under the dome of the daytime world, I reach my hand to the sky and touch the clouds. I close my right eye and puncture a passing cloud with my index finger. There it is; I feel blueness through the white and fluffy gauze. No dark shadows that block a streetlight, no evil to flavor the cooling wind.

The hum of bees in my few remaining rose blooms draw me back to the warm musty loam baking in the late summer sun. The bush roses are in need of trimming; unpruned blossoms have dried on the stalks. I crush the old dried petals into mulch with the grass clippings and leaf debris that I've been fermenting. I'll clean the trimmed rose leaves and shoots from the ground tomorrow; to leave them in the bed beckons pests and plant rot that can infect a healthy bush.

I find that, as with most things, pruning with the sharpest tool is best. My late wife, Annie, purchased a finely honed Felco secateur - pruning shear to most Americans - for our final anniversary and there have been many afternoons over the past two years that I while away hours clipping branch after branch. There is significant investment in those shears. The satisfaction of clenching the now-worn leather grips and the finality in the clean snip of a new bud from the waxy green skin of the stem cannot be overstated. Propagating the bud on another stalk successfully is icing on a cake, but not so thrilling as it used to be. I think I'm tired of starting things anew.

A canny psychologist would have a field day with my obsessive fascination with the Felco. Annie gave me the shears the day she died.

Annie suggested we meet at Cactus for an early evening anniversary celebration. Cactus is a tending-towards-too chic, overpriced Mexican cuisine place on Madison, but I like the grilled jalapenos.

We shared a fine meal, slowly eaten. We watched the other patrons and suffered the slightly elitist demeanor of an on-again, off-again attentive waiter. I nursed a single Negro Modelo to the end of dinner; as we debated dessert, Annie rose from the table. I confess I had yet to find that perfect 10 year anniversary gift, but she had found one for me. "I'll be right back - I left your gift in the car."

And that was that.

I watched her retreating back as she walked to front of the restaurant, admiring the view from the rear, and thought again that it was time for a weekend at the beach. Just she and I and the ocean and vast expanses of private sand and chilled Pinot Gris. The door swung shut behind her, a strange and rustic heavy wood airlock that thudded audibly over the buzz of diners. I challenged the laggard waiter with my request for two fresh spoons and a single order of Cuban flan.

The next thing. It's always the next thing. Surely there is a space before the next thing, like a space between words in a sentence? A moment where there is a chance to change course, to take back a thought, to unhear bad news, to repel an evil. That gap, that hole between the last thing and the next thing cannot be measured by any yardstick, or through a tensile density that anticipates the depth of upcoming pain, or love, or fear, or need, or hate.  Emotions bond together and become an angry, violent leaking packet of bile, and the next thing you know, the manager of the restaurant is at the table, assuring you that the ambulance is on the way. Service.

Annie had walked to the back of her car, pulled in on the diagonal as it was in front of the restaurant with the rear extended a bit into the street.

The next thing. As she lifted the lid on the trunk, the next thing hit Annie violently from the side; a car out of control and traveling far faster than it seems even possible on that jammed and narrow street. Hit and run. Her body was flung some thirty feet, ribs crushed, back broken, skull smashed against the pavement in such a way that her face was unrecognizable as they loaded her shattered body in the ambulance. To me; her face was lost to me. My Brittania rose, crushed petals, red petals.

As the EMT secured the back doors of the ambulance from the outside, hasping me in at Annie's feet, I turned and glimpsed the figure through the rear window, a figure dressed so dark on that warm night of death, in the street a few yards south of Annie's last moments. Each time I see him now, I recall him standing there on the street; my first recognition of something, somebody, hailing death like calling a cab. His hip slightly canted to the side, his right arm partially lifted. I remember now. He wasn't waving, he was reaching, one-armed, to the sky.

His name is Latham. He's no longer human.

*************************

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents reside only in the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is completely coincidental.

(copyright 2008-2009 exmearden)

the things you think you want

In the past few months, maybe a year, I've thought a lot about the things I thought I wanted. Out of life, out of myself, out of my kids, from my family in general, from my government, from my friends. It's possible to live a half century and find out that the stones set in the first layer of a personal foundation were rocks of crumbling sandstone.

It's like building anything. If the foundation is shaky, the building cannot stand for long.
The tools used are important as well. Resources, building materials, tools, know-how, motivation, planning and creativity. I've had wisps and bits, mass and multiples, of all of these elements. Putting all things together in the right fashion, and with the right timing, has eluded me.

Here's a personal example in the queen-size wooden bed I built three weeks ago. I had the tools, the know-how, the design, but the resources were just not there. I walked into Lowe's with $25 in my pocket. The discount route on the materials was choosing to use two-by-fours as the frame, instead of standard side rails built with sturdier two-by-sixes. Not enough money to buy additional wood for adequate crossposts or possibly use four-by-fours for the legs. It took less than three weeks for the bed to fall apart. (Don't jump on it! Bounce! Crack!)  I knew it would break, it was just the timing of the fail that escaped me. I nailed the damn thing back together with one-by-ones cut on a miter as a kind of triangular brace. I nailed the damn thing with nails this time, in frustration and impatience tinged with sadness that I hadn't been able or willing to do a better job the first time. I used nails, not wood screws. The fix is indelicate, rough, and again, impermanent. I know it is. How much have I defined my future actions by my past choices?

Such a template sketches the pattern of my life as a series of impermanent projects, never fully finished, always waiting for a better redux, a more efficient design, a better source of funding, a more meaningful engagement with life.

Such a template translates as well to how I've engaged with family, now mostly gone. I was always waiting for more time to chat, more time to dig into the personal, a more meaningful engagement of minds with the people I was born into. It didn't happen, and now it won't.

At the end of this year full of drama and massive failures and things gone that we all thought were forever, my take-away that I throw out to you all is that it's time to re-examine what we think we want. Ponder what we need. Blend these two critical ingredients into a life that allows time to filter out the debris, even the healthy, healing debris, and move ahead, beyond that which is not necessary.

For me, it's time to pass grief by.

Happy New Year, all. I wish the very best for all of us, and warm memories of those we have lost.

(also posted at Dailykos, December 29, 2008)