We’re getting our third floor ready for human habitation. When we moved in eight years ago, this level had no heat, no AC, and no electricity. It was also home to a well-established bat colony - the largest they’d seen in 5 years, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources - that had had the run of the place since roughly the Hoover Administration. They used to poke their wings out under the door at night.

The bats, not the Hoover Administration.

So we evicted them, had all evidence of their 50+ year-occupancy removed via HEPA vac and bleach, installed AC and heating, installed storm windows, and wired the place up to code.

Oh, and we also had water leaks. And when I say ‘water leaks’, I mean the water was coming through the roof, through the attic, through the third floor, and into my desk chair on the second floor. Inconvenient. So we had all those dealt with also. However, coupled with the bats (and earlier futile attempts to deal with the bats), they had done some long-term damage to the plaster and lathing, mostly in the ceilings throughout the level. The original wallpaper was tattered and hanging in places like bandages from a mummy.

We decided to start with one of the rooms that was in the best shape, and turn it into a workout room. Originally, we were just going to clean everything really well. But one thing led to another, and before you could say ‘Random Orbital Floor Sander’, we were renting shit from Home Depot that required two people to carry to the car.

It also turned out that, like everything else with this house, she wasn’t going to let us off easy. We discovered that there was lead paint on the floor, so we had to dress Jill up like Dexter and hermetically seal her into the room with all the equipment before she could start sanding.

“Buhbee, put your hand up against the plastic so I can take a picture of it.”

While we were at it, we decided to get the center hallway knocked out too. More to follow when we’re actually finished with the painting and putting polyurethane on the floors. Until then, click below to see all the pictures to date.

This is one of the numerous old gas and electric fixtures original to our house. Sometimes, it contains a compact fluorescent bulb, and other times, the finger of a jitterbugging ghost.

Extreme tall angle

As described here.

Our house was built in 1902, on the crest of a low hill on Main Street. It was at first home to one of the town bankers and his family. When he had it built, he was about the same age as I am now. He and his wife raised five children within these walls, and their names were Floy, Glen, Mark, Charles, and Goldie May.

The banker and his wife are now buried in the old church cemetery off Main Street, as are several of their children, who really stopped being children long before even my grandparents began to be children. But for the briefest of lost moments, they were just children, brimming with play and youth and wholly unconcerned by the graveyard down the street, or their shared destiny within its gates. How many lives were lived within the very room from which I now type? I can feel the impression of them here now, tangible yet untouchable, unseen just below the surface of time, like rings deep within an aged tree. I imagine that it is the echoes of their lost footsteps that I hear as our own boys run through these halls.

Closing my eyes and rubbing the bridge of my nose, I find myself thinking of a poem about the nature of snowflakes, flitting and diving between houses - a wing’s ‘long memory’ across winter - which I admittedly discovered not within some dusty anthology of lesser-known poetry, but on a Baby Einstein DVD, of all places. But I’ll take my culture wherever it finds me.
 

Snow is a mind
falling, a continuous breath
of climbs, loops, spirals,
dips into the earth
like white fireflies
wanting to land, finding
a wind between houses,
diving like moths
into their own light
so that one wonders
if snow is a wing’s
long memory across winter.

~Steve Crow, “Revival”

By the late 1920’s, the house was serving as an inn and overnight boarding for tourists and travelers of the new electric railway between our town and the next. We have a copy of a postcard of it from that time which reads, in part: “Two baths, Shower, and Lavatory. Innerspring Mattresses… Rates 75¢ per person. Meals and Garage.”

The elderly couple we purchased it from six years ago had also raised a family here, and when they left, they took with them over thirty years of memories. There were stories lived here that flared, then faded, leaving faint, interlocking outlines across several generations of a single family. At a point, their stories intersected with our own, and they can all be traced from this very moment back, like the links of a chain disappearing into murky waters, anchored far below to the beginning of things.

Today, the front yard is still dipped where the trolley used to run, and our sidewalk and hedges end abruptly 15 feet short of the current road to accommodate the ghosts of that long ago railway. Sitting and swinging on the front porch, it’s easy to imagine the weary traveler, standing quietly between his suitcases at the end of the cracked walk - ready for the comforts of both the lavatory and the innerspring mattress. Or perhaps not a traveler at all, but a returning son, who followed the light in the windows, and found his way home.

Over the years, its grand originality was never subjected to period remodels. Most of it remains today exactly as it was for each of the five families who came before us. The slate roof is original, and although it is difficult to find people to work on it, as its current stewards, we have a longstanding duty to do so anyway.

The floor in the basement is hard-packed earth, and there’s still a large bin where they used to store potatoes in the summertime. The walls of the old coal room are still blackened and mottled by their years in service as a staging area for the furnace, and although the original furnace is gone, the tools used to tend it still hang on the wall, like chains in a dungeon.

Upstairs, the numerous oak doorways and window casings have never been painted, and all the original built-ins remain now as they were then. Not only are the dining room walls still papered with the original wallpaper, but I found unused rolls of it in an upstairs closet, still wrapped with twine, and labels, yellowed and crumbling, that read, “Sears, Roebuck and Co.”.

The hinges, knobs, and doorstops match the light fixtures and sconces, which are half electric and half gas. Each door can still be locked and unlocked by one of the various skeleton keys on the crowded ring that was passed down to us when our watch began. And in what would one day become Nate’s room, we found a strange-looking brass bed with a missing spindle and a mattress that possessed what I can only imagine could be described as innersprings.

Many of the windows still contain the original, wavy glass, and through them, the late afternoon and early morning sun casts patterns that look like fire, warmly frozen in mid-dance against the golden pine floors. When our boys peer through these antique windows, they are the very same ones that once reflected the looks of hope, expectation and the unfolding stories of those who peered through before them.

And perhaps they see not themselves looking back, but the continuous breath of snow, and within it, the childish faces of Floy, Glen, Mark, Charles, and Goldie May.