All the small things

There is a certain metaphysical energy that accumulates in places where people have lived.

It isn’t some woo-woo celestial vibration or spiritual haunting. It is a residue of sorts left behind from the lives once lived there. It is physical and observable. We see it, process it, and are influenced by it. Mostly without being aware that any one of those is even a thing that occurs.

When I first bought my old house, I knew the owners without having ever met them. I understood what they were like, what they valued, and how their lives had wended through decades right up until they were very old and in the fading last light of what had been a long marriage.

I knew all of that without asking – not that there was anyone to ask – from the faint residue their lives left behind. There were soft cues about days and years and life choices. Subtle things. How things were built and maintained. Solutions found when their lives entered some new phase and a need arose. The way things smelled.

When I bought the house, it had been home to only two families in the prior 50 years. The first had lived in it nearly the entirety of that span. The second lived in it for only the six years prior to me. That space between me and the long-time residents meant that there was very little to find in the way of obvious artifacts. There was almost nothing one might usually find in the attic, basement, or closets that dated back earlier than the most recent seller’s short tenancy.

Whatever artifacts had been left behind when they bought the house, they had cleaned nearly all of them out and they were thus gone by the time I arrived.

The house sat on a street along with fifteen others. One was a grand outlier. The other 14 had all once been exactly like mine. They sat on lots the size of a postage stamp but they were charming and warm center-hall colonials that were cozy and snug and sturdy. They had all been built in 1920 on lots carved out from what had once been a single, many acre parcel home to only the grand outlier. Three bedrooms, one really too small for all but a nursery or office, a full bathroom, and a detached garage.

Today, they are the kind of starter homes young families moving into town purchase as their first place together before graduating to something bigger as their children multiply and get older. And that makes the street both perfect for young parents but also transient. Homes change hands and then change hands again and in them live a continuous succession of young parents and young children.

Only one had been owned for more than ten years. It’s owner told me the only story I ever heard about my home’s long-time owners. It is all that I know of them through the actual passing along of information from someone who was a witness to it. It didn’t inform me as much as it confirmed something I had already known from a simple brass switch and a string through two pullies (but we will get to them).

They had been loving.

She had been a loving mother and wife. He had been a loving father and husband. They had grown old together without that changing.

As the street’s only longtime resident told me one day, by the time they were both quite old, their bodies had begun to break down. They got around well enough but were each wearing down in the predictable way men and women often did when they had reached adulthood in the 50s when many men worked physical jobs while their wives made a home and cared for their children. His was the wear and tear of labor. Hers was the wear and tear of time. He could no longer do the physical things of a younger man. She was still mobile and flexible in the way of someone who has long been a gardener but with failing eyesight.

As her vision failed and he lost the ability to do the physical things, the two of them would walk around the yard together. He would spot the dandelions springing up among the grass for her and she would bend down on gardener’s knees to pry them free with a metal prong. And in so doing each did what they had always done: tended to their home as a place they cared for and cared about.

The story confirmed what I had come to know myself:

They had been house-proud. He had tended to the maintenance of fixtures and features. She had tended to the little beds in the front yard and in back. She had likely planted the Rose of Sharon in the backyard that was now towering and beautiful in summer. She had cared for the yard like someone for whom love was a verb. An act compelled by a feeling rather than merely a passive emotion experienced without an impulse to express. Our work shows our motives. Acts of appearance and acts of love show up differently. Hers were acts of love.

Through the front door and up the stairs was a landing that had once been square. Two of its corners had been closed off diagonally to make room for storage. The one nearest the bathroom had been enclosed by a built-in. Three neat drawers on bottom. Two doors that opened to a stack of shelves for linens and towels above. The other corner had been closed off to allow for a closet in what would have once been a nursery (and eventually was again for my son).

The work had been careful and done well. It was an alteration but one done with care that it be an organic evolution of the home and not just a later change to a place made by residents to convenience their time in it.

Inside that careful wardrobe with its heavy drawers that still closed flush, was a small copper switch mounted discreetly on the inside of the frame.

It was what they call a “knife switch” and looked about like this:

Across the landing from where the switch was installed was a neat, circular hole cut in the base molding that ran through into the closet behind it.

Both had clearly served a purpose. The switch was a specific electrical component chosen for a specific project to meet a specific need. It had been installed carefully and used until it was no longer needed.

It took me a good long while to figure out what it had once done.

Want to take a minute and hazzard a guess before I go on? You can tell me in the replies if you got it…

.

.

.

.

.

.

That circular hole in the baseboard?

It had once been where an upstairs doorbell had been installed so people could hear someone at the door even when upstairs. The bell was mounted on the landing side. It’s machinery was mounted in the hole and wired from behind so as to not be an eyesore.

That switch in the closet?

It had once allowed someone to open or close the circuit to that doorbell.

It had been a silencer.

The hardware looked to date back to the 50s or 60s. It had likely been installed at a time when the people most likely to be in those little rooms when the doorbell rang were a mother and her sleeping babies.

It seemed ingenious and sweet. It took thought and planning and a not small amount of work. It was a project done by somehow who had wanted to do it.

Across from the built-in was a door up to a walk-up attic. The stairs were still painted in the sort of high-wear gun-metal gray that used to be popular for things like railings and basement floors that were meant to look neat rather than pretty.

Atop the stairs was a finished floor of narrow tongue-and-groove pine that had once been a dark green. At the far end of the floor, a nub of plumbing poked up through the boards capped, attached to nothing. The ceiling was unfinished to reveal the high-peaked frame of the roof. It felt sort of lodgey. At some point, someone had tacked up rolled insulation between the joists that was now old and probably did little.

At the foot of the stairs, a little string dangled to a convenient height. If you gave it a little tug, the attic light 30 feet away would come on. That happened because the little string was actually a very long string that had been threaded through a sequence of little mounted rollers that guided it up the stair well, across to the roof line and then down to the bulb without ever being seen.

Under the basement stairs, I eventually found an old, unused radiator. It had somehow survived the home’s two turnovers because it weighed a damn ton and could be ignored on moving day as something okay to leave.

It was not a radiator that had been replaced. There weren’t any rooms without one. At some point though, it had been fed by plumbing from the steam boiler to heat a room.

The attic. That little nub of plumbing poking up through the boards, it had fed that radiator.

The finished floor and radiator hookup and string that let you turn off a room light on your way down the stairs… that had been a bedroom at one point… and it remained one until the 1970s when little ones who had once been left to sleep by a silenced door bell had grown up into teens and then adults and left home. And then the energy crisis hit and fuel cost a fortune and the radiator came out and whereas most homes insulated the attic floor to create the smallest heating envelope, those pine boards that had once been laid to make a bedroom for a teenager made it easier to insulate the underside of the roof.

I will wrap this up but before I do, one last, little thing…

When we first closed on the house and it was empty and ours, I walked around in the empty rooms and then out to the detached garage. It was original to the home. It had two big carriage doors that swung open from the middle. It was unfinished. It had a bare floor.

The first time I walked into it, it brought me back to my grandfather’s barn like I had just been there yesterday not 30 years ago. That barn had been a cavernous workshop with workbenches and old tools and machinery along with five gallon cans of oil and kerosene. My grandfather kept his old 1950s pickup in that barn.

My detached garage smelled so exactly like it, it was like I had walked into it. I loved it for that.

There is a certain metaphysical residue that accumulates in places where people have lived.

It seeps into the ground as oil drops from old pickups. It is left behind as nubs of plumbing and circular holes in floor boards. It shows up in little brass switches and strings and pullies and small glass knobs on hallway drawers chosen to match doorknobs that had been there much longer.

We leave footprints.

They may be faint impressions in the sand. They may fade as the tides of time and change wash over them. But they remain.

I like those footprints. I like seeing them and noticing.

They give me a sense of place.

It connects me to the people there before me and around me now. It makes me feel like I am not the first nor will be the last but am instead part of something larger and with a greater longevity than any one lifetime including my own.

I am a noticer of things. Hidden switches to let babies sleep. Painted pine that was once green. An overlooked manual in the basement drawer of an emptied house for an ancient appliance long ago removed that had once been saved for and installed as a meaningful upgrade.

And I think we are alive at a time when those things are not only largely unnoticed but also disappearing… and as they do, we become less attuned to them, value them less, part with them more easily, and may feel a loss but could never name its cause.

That metaphysical residue, it matters to me. I think it is important. I think it enriches my life and gives it context. It shapes how I think and talk. And it animates how I tell stories as if to take people along with me to places as if we are going together rather than me having gone alone and reported back.

I like all of that. And I like writing about it.

And all of this is to say that I will be writing about it more. Specifically, finding that metaphysical residue in the places where it collects.

I have a series in mind. This was either the setup or the setup to the setup. But either way, I’m planning a little running roadtrip of sorts. Where you find that dust, you find stories.

If you are interested in coming, I’d like to take you along.

The first stop is at my local pub to get one for the road. It has a sense of place and stories that come with it.