The Rock Wall House

There is a house I used to pass by often. An unassuming little home set back from the road flanked by trees that grew in full each spring and shaded it from full view of passersby. The effect was a sort of camouflage. It made the house the kind you could drive or walk by a hundred times without ever really noticing. You might be vaguely aware it was there - “The yellow one, right?” – but you’d remember little more about it than just that.

A friend used to live on the next block. His house, along with most of the others on the street, looked freshly painted and cared for and maintained to look neat. Their lawns were green and full. Their flower beds were neatly edged. The effect of the presentation was a sort of subtextual signaling that the owners were all in their earning years and doing well enough to afford discretionary things like landscaping projects to improve the aesthetics rather than just maintain the property.

Most of the homeowners on the street were comfortably upper middle class; had white collar jobs, and were raising kids. Their nests were either full or filling. Their homes had been bought to accommodate the full flock either already in tow or planned. The homes themselves had been built 80, 90, or 100 years ago; and that had been part of their charm.

Their sale had been just part of a cycle which had repeated over and over since their construction. They had repeatedly changed hands over decades as part of the seamless ongoing renewal of neighborhoods with homes sized for full families. The only thing that had changed was the cycle time. A century ago, the handovers were spaced by decades. Plural. 20, 30, 40 years. Those intervals had shortened. And there were a lot of reaons for that.

For the half-century beginning with the Baby Boom, those transitions had largely been baton passes. Handoffs from like to like. Sales by older parents (with children who were now adults themselves) to younger ones from the same general economic station as the sellers. A lateral. A tossing of the football from veterans to rookies different in age but not class or means.

As demand for homes in the area grew, those handoffs became more of a laddering of wealth. They shifted from being horizontal transitions to a gradual frog-hop up the economic pyramid. One by one, older homeowners on only so high an economic rung were replaced by younger ones already a rung or several rungs higher.

By the time my friend moved onto the street, that laddering had already been long underway. Today, all but a few of the homes are owned by people like him: buyers who had bought into the neighborhood when it was already well along in a trend of steepening home prices.

With rising relative home prices – increases greater than the trend nationally, regionally, or even locally – comes shifting demographics. Average household incomes, net worth, and level of employment – executive, managerial, professional, trade, or unskilled; all go upwards. Homeowner age sort of swells in the middle and flattens at the ends. The percent of early-career and late- or post-career homeowners goes down; the percent of mid-career homeowners goes up. A neighborhood which once had a homeowner population spanning the continuum of life stages flattens to have only a vertical slice of people in just one. What had been a microcosm of an overall community becomes an enclave of people in just one segment.

That effect tends to accelerate. The paucity of younger homeowners shortens the occupancy length. People who move there later in their lives stay there for less of them. And people who have long been there find themselves owning properties they may love but no longer require to have bedrooms for  bodies. Barring any other factor, they might stay in them anyway; but when home values rise disproportionately, so do property taxes.

Property taxes (in my area at least and I assume in most or all) are computed as a straight percentage of assessed of home value. If your home doubles in value while your crosstown neighbors’ or next-town friends’ only increased by 50%, that straight property tax multiplier moves your total a lot more than theirs; and when the property taxes themselves are also rising, the net-increase can quickly become so burdensome, staying wouldn’t be an option even it was an interest.

That dynamic – a steepening of the means required to move in and stay - changes neighborhoods more than the sudden shifts in homeowner ages themselves.

Sales from older owners to younger ones of equivalent means keep neighborhoods young and vibrant but unchanged in character. Sales from owners of one means to buyers of higher means changes not just the population but also the character and usually the diversity.

Neighborhoods are renewed by chutes and changed by ladders.

Chutes – lateral handoffs from later life stage to earlier – reset the homeowner age but not station; ladders – passes upwards from one level of means to a higher one – change the place.

Today, there are very few homes left on the street like the one this story is about. That dwindling set share a few things in common.

They all have yards and landscaping which telegraph the owners are not just older adults but ones who had first made a nest there when it was affordable to people of an economic means lower than required to move in today. Even before they got older and maybe retired, they mowed their own lawns and trimmed their own hedges and raked their own yards in the fall. They toted the heavy three-foot tall bags of leaves out to the curb for collection themselves. Left and right down the street would be a line of others in front of neighbors’ homes.

Today, their neighbors have their lawns cleared by landscapers with gas leafblowers who descend on their properties in sudden packs that swoop in like a platoon coming ashore at a beachhead. They arrive; do their work in a roaring cacophony; and then disappear back into trucks leaving the neighborhood quiet again. Those homes’ owners neither see them come nor see them go; the owners merely leave for work with unraked lawns and return to ones that looks like they’ve been vacuumed.

Don’t get me wrong, I would rather stick a fork in my eye than rake leaves. I would rather pay someone to do it than do it myself. It isn’t so much about the raking of one’s own leaves as a social norm in decline. It is about the correlations and consequences of an array of subtle changes in how we live and work and spend our free time… and how we interact.

We’re busy. We work long hours. And then we’re tired. We have little free time and how we spend it is therefore a value judgment with higher opportunity cost than it had for the generation before us and before that one. Today, the hiring of the 74^th Leaf Blower Batallion, if you can afford it, is a decision easily made. When it isn’t a choice between either being able to afford piano lessons or get out of having to rake, it is an easy decision.

With that decision comes one tiny, unnoticed, and imperceptible consequence which happens to be the same as an endless array of others which also go unnoticed.

When you live in a community, there is no portion of it more immediate and proximal to you than the people next door or across the street. As minor as it may seem as an influencer on sociologic change, yard work was once a connector. Planting and mowing and raking and shoveling. Tending to flower beds. Watering lawns with a hose. Trimming hedges and planting shrubs. All of those things were “interaction occasions”.

They were opportunities for face-to-face contact. While the interactions themselves might have just been brief and occasional, they occurred. And even that fact alone subtly influenced their nature.

You don’t notice the flowers coming up in a yard you’ve never looked at. You don’t notice a new haircut on someone you never see. You don’t notice an absence when you don’t first notice a presence.

When you see someone, no matter how cursorily, with any degree of frequency, you notice things about them and related to them. Those things give rise to what might be casual comments but often become conversations.

“Hey, haven’t seen you lately. Hope you were away somewhere on vacation…”

“We went to visit family in Arizona.”

“Where in Arizona? My wife’s brother lives in Tempe.”

These little exchanges may seem so trivial – and they ARE – but they, collectively, no matter how lightly, connect people to people. And when the social dynamics that connected neighbor to neighbor work the same way for the neighbor the next house down… and the one a street over… and the one on the other side of town… all of those faint threads result in an organic spiderweb. Each little segment of silk is a connection of person to person. Collectively, they are the connections of community. And when people connect to community, they anchor to place.

They stay in yellow houses set back from the road with trees that grow in full in the summer. They remain in a home when they could afford to buy a larger one; and then they remain in it when they could downsize.

It isn’t so much that people should buy a house the moment they can or should stay in one forever; it’s that neighborhoods like the specific one I am about to talk about are undergoing vast social transformations not just in terms of who lives there but how they do and for how long they do. The aggregate effect of a whole syndrome of economic and social changes is a distancing and detachment and transience.

People live within the four walls of a house they have less attachment to than the people who sold it. They live their for less time. And while they do, they form fewer connections with neighbor and community, interact less, anchor less, and therefore come to exist in a personal world that is like a floating bubble that travels with them. In it is none of the casual diversity of contact and interaction their grandparents had. Instead, it is filled with a concentrated set of like-to-like relationships and engagements.

If the people who lived on the particular street I’m talking about back in 1950 or 1960 or even 1980 had catalogued every single face-to-face social interaction they had in their lives for a week and then their list was held up to the one compiled by present residents, one would be a scroll and one would be a page.

The scroll would list a litany of names of people only barely known but recognized. John at the hardware store. Ellen across the street. Marilyn, the woman who used to work at the Bluebottle, who they bumped into at the grocery store.

The page would be comprised of nearby friends, coworkers, and people to whom they were connected by some current mutual activity. The list would be dominated by people whose own floating personal bubbles overlapped with theirs by default. There would be next to no names on the list who were just casual acquaintances encountered in passing.

That is how most of our lives work today.

And since they do, we are not only losing that passive social connectivity, we are losing the orientation toward it and the aptitude for it. We don’t know how to lightly connect as an active practice. We aren’t oriented to necessarily say more than “Hi, how are you?” when the person ten houses down passes us while we’re walking our dogs.

The people in those old yellow houses are the ones who couple throwaways with hooks. They are the ones who say “Hi there.” Just like we do but then also add “I can’t believe how big he’s gotten. He was just a puppy!”

And we let those hooks get reeled back in without a bite.

I’m writing another piece that only tengentially relates to this one at best but in it, there is a very fleeting appearance from someone’s elderly neighbor. In writing about it, I briefly mentioned that she was a warm, sweet woman who I liked. Now, in writing this, I’ve been reminded of how many warm, sweet older neighbors I’ve crossed paths with in both the array of places I’ve lived and in the ones I’ve visited enough to meet much of anyone.

There was the woman who lived diagonally across the street from my aunt and uncle; and the woman who lived next door to my father; and the one in the apartment two floors up as a kid; and the man who owned the home across from mine.

I’ve always sort of mentally catalogued those people as just n’s of 1. Individuals rather than a population segment. I think it is more that they seemed particularly friendly and warm because their friendliness and warmth was the social style of their era – and the social style of ours is more distant and detached.

My social style is paradoxically split between the two.

In the bar I frequent and coffee shop I used to hit most mornings and restaurant that was my Friday tradition, I am of that warmer and friendlier era. I connect and get to know the people one conversation fragment at a time until, over time, I’ve come to know that Nick, the weekend valet, is on his second marriage, works fulltime in the Clifton school system, and valets on weekends because his stepdaughter has had recurrent issues with addiction which led to he and his wife raising his stepgrandaughter.

Other times, I am the opposite for one of two reasons or a combination thereof: 1) I am the product of a childhood in New York City where someone else’s prolonged eye contact makes me assume I may soon have to give them the ol’ eye-rake with a fistful of keys; and 2) To be honest, I often just have no interest in making smalltalk.

So, being perfectly honest, I’m not likely to be the protagonist being referred to in someone else’s eventual “warm, friendly older neighbor” story.

Yet, man of contradictions that I am, I happen to really like those kinds of neighbors… and I happen to really like their continued habitation in places I live, visit, and know.

So, houses like that yellow one, I like them.

I like them more than freshly painted one with the beautifully manicured lawn across the street; and I like them a metric shit-ton more than the ones around town which had a designer’s sign on the lawn for six months and then emerged from renovation with some inscrutable but trendy design element which makes absolutely no damn sense to me and will someday in the not-distant future come to be seen as its opposite: an out-of-style leftover which people keen on house-as-style now see as quite the indictment of the inhabitants’ taste.

Now, if this were a movie, here is where I would pan slowly across a wide shot of the street until the yellow one slid into frame and then, when it reached center, I’d stop the pan, lock focus, and slowly zoom in until only the yellow house and its property filled the frame.

I used to drive by that house all the time. I had an apartment all the way down the other end of the street. Plus, there was my friend’s house down the block. Between those two things, I had occasion to pass the yellow house often.

It didn’t have a front fence. It had a chainlinked fence that ran along the sides of the property and across the back but the front yard was just your regular ol’ lawn split by a sidewalk up the front door.

One day, a rock wall appeared in front of it.

Well, let me clarify, not so much a rock wall per se. More just a long pile of stones that ran across the entire front yard. To even call it a pile is generous. It was just this sort of sloppy row of rocks which looked like they had been dumped there for some project which had yet to start.

The stones themselves didn’t look like they were what you’d pick for any landscaping project of any kind though. There was no rhyme or reason to their sizes. It wasn’t just that they weren’t the same size or even in the neighborhood. They weren’t, collectively, the kind of set you could make into a stone wall where some variation is good. They weren’t in the same color family. They weren’t the same kind of rock. Metamorphic, sedimentary… They weren’t piled up to make a very old-fashioned, very Robert Frosty kind of rock wall with just stone just piled upon stone.

They were just - to be perfectly honest - a random, ugly hodge-podge of rocks sort of loosely dumped in messy row.

I just assumed their sudden appearance had to foreshadow some labor which would transform them into something which was considerably less ugly – because, literally any labor at all, even if performed by drunken circus clowns, stood a decent chance of making that mess less of an eyesore.

Seriously, push them all up together a bit. Make the running row a little less triangular. Tidy them up a bit. Anything. Jesus, they were like an effort at uglification.

And then the next time I went by and the next and the next 500, that same random loose gathering of unaffiliated stones just sat there unchanged. It didn’t get bigger or smaller or more orderly. No lawn sign appeared for some mason or contractor. That ugly row of rocks just saw summer and then fall, winter, spring, and then another. whole. cycle. of. seasons.

A couple years. The thing sat there for a couple years without the faintest sign of being remedied… corrected… undone.

And then I thought maybe the owners had commissioned the purchase of the materials for a project and then had fallen on some financial setback which made the completion impossible.

And then I felt kinda bad for having presumptively condemned the owners as people of a bad taste somehow so wholly their own, it was beyond my ability to even parse as a comprehensible taste of any kind – even the bad kind. I mean, even tacky isn’t random.

So, now I had gotten myself into an entirely internalized limbo between either a) feeling quite terrible about my cattiness and judgment; and b) having confirmation that the people in the yellow house really just had an absolutely titanic flair for the ugly.

That’s a pretty unfair position to put a neighbor in – even if you have no awareness of it, don’t know them, and have never met.

I, naturally, didn’t appreciate them doing that to me, so I then took to shaking my head every time I drove past as if they were somehow wronging me by not resolving what those rocks were for so I could know whether to feel guilty or superior.

Nothing.

A couple times, it looked like maybe the rocks had been moved a little but it wasn’t like I was taking surveillance photos of a North Korean military installation and could compare before and after. There just seemed to be some vague, subtle arranging or rearranging  while still preserving the overall feeling of being wholly unarranged.

Then, it seemed like maybe a couple of rocks had been added here and there; but, to be honest, even if they had, the reason for doing so would be even farther out into the distant ultraviolet of reasoning invisible to me.

Weeks went by… months… another year… and the the slightly less loose accumulation of rocks just sat there across the front of the yard like it was an actual rock wall. You. Have. No. Self. Awareness. Rocks. Pull yourselves together.

We’re talking several years by now… Five? Six?

Now, here’s the thing about even ugly things: they wear you down. They eventually lose their ability to appall and then the next you know, you aren’t even shaking your head when you drive by anymore. That is their insidious nature. They just grind down your resolve to baselessly dislike them. It is really unfair.

<sighhhh>

I literally just sighed that sigh after typing that last paragraph.

They wore me down through their infernal doing of nothing.

Me, in the car, driving down that street:

<house, house, house, house, rockwall house, house, house, house>

Nothing. Not even the faintest whiff of reflexive, undeserved contempt. Those rocks made me dead inside.

Then, the wall started to grow a little. There were definitely some rocks being added. Not a lot. Not enough to change its shape or overall mass. But some. Like tuck-ins. Smaller rocks that were just sort of magically now in some of the big voids between the largest ones that had always been there.

And that glacially slow and almost unnoticeable incremental growth continued on for a year… years…

It was like that was just the rock wall’s state now. It had been inert. Now, it was growing.

Meanwhile, in towns big or small, when something sticks out, it gets talked about. It might start as just a passing comment made by neighbor to neighbor but eventually there have been enough of those that the whispers have become a conversation.

The Rock Wall House was now a proper noun.

Everyone knew the Rock Wall House. No one knew anything about the reason why it had come to exist and then eventually awoken from its long slumber… or at least no one I knew anyway.

In decades past back when we saw as important quaint things like actual local newspapers filled with actual stories about people, places, things, and events which were actually local, the Rock Wall House was the sort of throwaway local curiosity that would have found its way into a feature at some point.

My town had a local paper but it was a fairly aseptic publication that ran little more than coverage of Town Council meetings, stories about where some real estate development was in the formulaic cycle of proposed and then opposed and then approved over the angry objections of people in town.

The Rock Wall House would find no ink there.

However, we had a town blog… and over time, it came to be a really not too shabby digital proxy for a town paper. It had a couple columnists who wrote regular pieces. It had people who filed stories with enough regularity for me to recognize names in bylines. And it occasionally had a piece or two written by someone whose name I didn’t recognize about some local thing or doing.

I had no idea how the blog worked or how pieces came to find their way into it… but I checked it religiously.

One day, there was a story about the Rock Wall House.

And Lord Baby Jesus in your golden fleece diaper, after I read it, I loved that damn rock wall.

The owners of the home were an older couple. In their seventies, I believe, by the time of the writing of the piece. He had been a psychologist. They had lived in that home forever. Raised their kids in it. You can still see the reflective sticker in one of the upstairs windows which people used to affix in rooms where a child slept so firemen could rescue them if there were ever a fire.

The kids had known no other home. Three of them. They had gone to school in town and long ago graduated and gone on to adulthood and lives of their own.

And then, when the owners were in their early sixties, their daughter passed away.

The father, plunged into a deep grief, wallowed in it struggling to cope with the loss of his child.

And then he started building the wall. He didn’t have a specific reason. He doesn’t remember what he had been thinking when decided to do it or started working on it. Then, for years, throughout the entire initial period when I was driving by sure absolutely nothing at all had changed or done to it, he had been going out to the wall and moving stones. He would pick up a few that seemed to have rolled off or move some about to order them differently.

The project had been a balm. The constant stacking and re-stacking had been a task taken to as a meditation of sorts.

It was a busying of hands to quiet an aching of heart.

The initial build had been all his work. I have no idea where he acquired all of the first stones; but he had been the one to carry and stack them and lay them in their loose line.

But then the project changed.

That period when I noticed the wall seemed to be growing? Well, it was.

While all I saw was a few new stones among the old – and while I knew nothing of the reasons for there to be either new or old – there were at least some people who did. Neighbors, people known over decades of those loose, feathery social connections I talked about, some of them knew.

They knew of his and his wife’s loss. They knew of his grief. Knew of his project, it’s purpose, and meaning.

As acts of condolence, others beagn to add rocks to the wall. The contributions were both announced an unannounced. Sometimes, rocks just appeared.

And then that accumulation was noticed by other people. People who knew nothing of the reasons for the rock wall or its slow addition of new stones noticed it too. Someone was incrementally adding to the pile. It was clearly a project of purpose and intention. They didn’t need to know why. They just began to add their own.

Stones appeared. Steadily, over months and then years, stones just appeared. Some were delivered with notes explaining their provenance. Some had meaning to their givers. Some were collected from far away places, and then ported home. Some were just rocks piled upon rocks.

But all were contributions to a father’s labor of grief.

I read the little blog post about that almost a decade ago. I have never forgotten it.

I’ve driven by The Rock Wall House a thousand times since. And each and every time, I look at that wall and am glad its there. It is love and loss and care and community. It is grief. But is also empathy and kindness and compassion. And it is the latter in response to the former. And that is community.

A few weeks ago, I drove by the house and there was a For Sale sign in the yard. I was so sad to see it. I assumed the owners – one or both – had passed away. They would be in their mid- to late eighties now. Or maybe they had moved to somewhere easier on aging bodies.

In their departure though, that installation… that art project that began as the literal carrying of a father’s grief and then became a daily meditation on it… it will be lost.

That thing I drove by without understanding and then thought poorly of and then ultimately came to love, it would be lost. That physical thing - that inscrutable project made up of an accumulation of stones which began during one person’s struggle to cope on their own but then became a community’s means of providing support – it would be gone.

I will miss it. I will miss those rocks, that wall.

Life is so very heavy sometimes. Many hands make lighter its heaviest burdens.

We should help carry each other’s stones.