American Letters - Letter 3 - The House

The house they bought and the house that got away.

In the first days after they moved into their first home, he discovered himself to be changed by the idea they owned the house and the land around it. He would stare at a dried leaf outside the window of his bathroom, hypnotized as it fluttered in the wind, as if it were a tiny flag–his flag–but found and not planted by him at all. Now as precious to him as anything else.

That leaf or one like it is still there somehow, so frail and yet so powerful. He is, five years into living here, less haunted by it, but that first winter it seemed to keep him occupied as it turned into the first year of COVID, and the world was at times as small as the distance between himself, in the bathroom, and the leaf on the branch just outside. He was unable to write a journal but when he sees the leaf now, he feels an extraordinary intimacy.

Another installment in the third person letters. For the story thus far, check out American Letters 1 and American Letters 2.

The house is the smallest property on his road, he learns one day, from the mechanic at one of the garages near the town, who tells him this matter of factly. The mechanic is a neighbor up the road. He holds up the check and looks at the address. “Oh,” he says. “Smallest home on the road.”

And yet when he comes home he feels like a king. 

As his friend Lisa Lucas likes to say, “Look at what books did.”

The other homes on the road are mostly unknown to him. He has been in just three of them. They all seem to have more land than theirs, though he isn’t sure he wants more. He did once but it was part of a grand vision, not at all what they have here—the woods on all sides, the feeling of being truly alone in a way he hasn’t known since he was young. Unwatched by anyone.

The house is substantial, inexpensive and well-made, a modest lot, much of it woods, from which, periodically, thus far, turkeys, a fox, a mink, bats, a porcupine, a feral cat, luna moths, a black bear, all appear like guest stars on a variety show for some short vivid performance, often indifferent to his and his husband’s attentions. Perhaps they are there for each other. A few times, it has sounded as if someone is eating their house, and that was, they learned, a signal that a porcupine had come and was doing just that. His husband, Dustin, looked up cures online and made a solution of capsaicin sprayed on the wall–basically putting hot sauce on the house to keep the porcupines away. A Have A Heart trap decorates the front garden, almost an art installation at this point, as the ground hogs pay it no mind, capering across their yard when surprised from their resting place in the stone wall running from the driveway to the lilacs at the house’s edge. 

A ruffed grouse used to take to the stone wall at the far edge of their property and thrum a mating call from under the ancient apple tree there. In the first three years, they each thought the noise was a different thing. He believed it was a rubber therapy ball bouncing and slowly coming to rest. His husband was sure it was a lawn mower. When the first ruffed grouse died violently after striking their picture window, they took his body to the nest of fox kits they’d seen in their neighbor’s yard, and then set out bird decals on their windows. This took getting used to until he walked down the upstairs hallway, in awe of how they glowed like ghosts at night, illuminated by the security lights. 

A replacement grouse arrives, as if the stone wall in the backyard were an assigned beat of some kind and he is the next on a shift. He performs in the exact same spot, and sounds the exact same way. He has thus far not struck the window. He knows this bird may or may not be descended from the first grouse, but he secretly hopes he is. 

*

The first house they fell in love with seemed to be their perfect house: a one bedroom tower of a kind, round on one side, with three floors–bedroom, kitchen, library, a special Finnish woodstove that could heat the whole house. A second building was nearby, a dance studio with a sleeping loft above a tiny kitchen and bathroom. A writing cabin was off in the woods by the driveway. And then around those buildings, over 100 acres. It was strangely cheap, in the manner of places where a terrible crime has happened or a place poisoned by industry.

The windows would all need to be replaced. They had grown cloudy with age. There was an entire natural spring pond, full of what seemed like unknowable feral life. He could not imagine swimming in it. 

The strange house stayed empty for years as the listing made no sense. It felt more like an abandoned colony on another earth-like planet, post-apocalyptic, someplace a future was born and then gave up. Too odd for a family, too odd it seemed possibly for anyone except maybe them. The first owner’s widow, a ballet dancer for whom the dance studio was built, sometimes let friends stay there but had remarried and moved on. She believed it had healing properties. When they visited the house to look it over, the realtor said, “I hope you like quirk.”

He did. His mouth was most likely open at times as they toured the house from the inside at last. The curved specialty windows. The balcony on the third floor. The strange spiral staircase, which felt makeshift unlike the custom wood cabinets everywhere else.

The mud dauber wasps had built little homes inside the house and he had wondered over the years it sat empty what they might be up to. They then decided at last to call a realtor and make an offer.

An offer had come in just ahead of them. He asked if he could make a competing offer. Oh, no, said the realtor, without explaining. He was saddened. They did like the quirk. He was still learning how to buy a house as no one had ever really explained it to him. He would meet with the realtors and say “Explain this to me like it’s my first time because it is,” but he knew he seemed too old to say these things and they just sent him paperwork he didn’t understand. Finally a realtor friend explained it all.

The house they bought, he and his husband texted the listing to each other almost at the same time. It was the fall of 2019. They went and visited and felt immediately drawn to it. The pine floors were broad like in the older homes, sometimes called pumpkin pine because the wood turns a deep orange. Their home is newer, however. The owner was leaving after an acrimonious divorce, moving with her daughter to another town. A peach tree was fruiting in the yard and she offered them each a peach to leave with. She accepted their bid two days later. They moved in just after Thanksgiving of 2019.

The house is new—built in the 1990s—and the builders live up the hill, a couple. “We were still learning, we didn’t know what we were doing,” they said a few times of the house’s construction and then laughed afterward. But he can’t tell what was done badly yet.

Every other year, the peach tree in the yard fills with fruit. The first time it bore fruit for them, the branches came down to the driveway, like the tree was bowing at their return. It is fruiting again.

He eats three peaches today, in quick succession and then looks up how many he can eat a day. 3-4. He decides to be as careful as he can.