The How? of Our Decision

The Emotional “How”

The conversation always begins, “What made you decide to do that?”  The topic in question being a move from suburbs to city. Truth be told, the move had yet to occur, but the financial commitment was complete, and the emotional vow in process.

My husband and I had been attending a cocktail party for a councilman running for re-election when we were asked THE question. We had introduced ourselves with the moniker, “moving from the outer ring to the city…”

Thus the question from the councilman, “What made you decide to do that?”

We glanced at each other, then Mark gestured to me, “It’s your turn.” This time, my words would shape the story.  I hit the highlights, sharing the sequence of events in bullet points, as opposed to my husband’s more verbose style:

• ·      Blended marriage
• ·      Bored one Saturday, snow cancelled kid’s events
• ·      Read about new condos in Gateway Quarter
• ·      Learned Gateway Quarter a rebranding of OTR
• ·      Took condo tour, drank free coffee
• ·      Realized we had four kids, extended families, condos wouldn’t work
• ·      Read about a builder developing single family homes in OTR
• ·      Walked about with said builder in OTR
• ·      Builder revealed hidden gem on Race
• ·      Toured home - no heat, electric, windows or walls, empty for 40 years.
• ·      Discussed once on drive home
• ·      Sold

I finished spouting off my list, but the story was incomplete. I had left out the emotional “How”. How does one make this decision, moreover, how do two?

How can one foresee two years into the future, amidst abandoned buildings that had yet to house anything but rats?

How does one make this decision to uproot a lifestyle, albeit for possibly a more active one, though our kids might disagree because the boy says we are never home?

How does one respond to a father who feels some sadness because he and his son might not lunch as often?

How does one tell current neighbors we are moving away, to initiate a new lifestyle? We want to live in the vibrancy of the city. We don’t want to age in place, that is grow old standing still.

How could anyone understand that this project has been our love child? I brought a boy, he brought three girls, we were two shy of a Brady Bunch marriage, but opted against procreating anymore. Four was enough. When the biological clock tick, tocked, we bought, instead of birthed.

How could one feel what excitement we would have selecting an Italian range hood and reliable refrigerator, imposing our genes on our selections? He liked blue, I liked the purple and orange.  He wanted new, I wanted to save everything.

How could one predict, over the many months of gestation, the home would become something we loved together?  We paid homage to its olds ghosts and made accommodations for future guests. Its shell of rafters and 2x4s became the empty slate on which we would write our experiences, overtop layers of plaster, drywall, brick and wood.

As we progressed through the process, the decisions became part smarts, part signs, again an imposition of our dispositions on the re-birthing of this home. 

I will never wholly grasp this decision and its future implications.  In the same way, we never fully know our children, but are willing to share them with the next generation.

In the New House....

“In the new house….”  These are the four words I mutter to the dog, as he pants away, looking for droppings from the dining table.   “What’s that?”  My son asks.  “Four words…in the new house….”  From this I mean, things will be different for the  dog who has taken his breed name seriously (King Charles Spaniel). While I admit to killing any chance I had at training him, by constantly referring to him as the cutest dog in the world, I still feel the need to pull back and tell him, “Things will be different” in the new house.

How?  The dog inquires, head tilted to one side. How? The son inquires, head tilted to one side. I mull this over, while chewing on dinner, recalling a poem by Mary Oliver– How Would You Live Then?

“What if the bees filled your walls with honey and all

you needed to do was ask them and they would fill

the bowl?

What if, the poet asks over and again. Just as I am doing so now.

“In the new house…” there will be no teenage clutter, the drum set will be long sold off Craigslist.  The husband will clean his desk, or the desk will be out sight at night, so as not to interrupt my feng shui.  The dog will not have a sight line to the outdoors, without of course jumping on a bench seat, which in the new house he won’t be allowed to. In the old house, he recently seceded from the union and took up residence on the mudroom seat bench, where yesterday, I had set down an older flat screen TV, and the dog proceeded to nest there.

I walk aimlessly through boxes of my parents’ belongings, following the passing of my father, and swear I will not accumulate to the level at which he and Mom did so. I will set out looking for a new world order. But I recognize it is not even the orderly nature of things that I am searching for. But a new way of living.  TVs will be hidden or up on the third floor. The kids will have to climb two sets of narrow, steep steps to watch HBO. In the new house, there will be no yellow plastic University of Oregon cups that pass as stemware.

The dining table will pull double duty as the kitchen table.  And the main floor will be real living space, not living rooms, but spaces to converse, gaze out a window, listen for the noises of the street.  There is no “away” room as well-known author and architect Sarah Susanka proposes, a place for quiet. With the exception of the click-clack of the keyboard, the entire house will be quiet without any kids until holidays or breaks.

I am thankful for the time which has forced me to consider how will I use a kitchen when there are only two people and not six. How much space does one need to write? How big a desk?  Shouldn’t the focus be more on size of the imagination than the size of the desk?

Furniture. Pictures. “What is valuable, what does valuable mean?  What to keep, what to put in storage, what to give away?   I previously asked movers who helped with mom and dad’s possessions “Aren’t we better off as a throwaway society?” Not in the terms of taking over landfills, or refusing to recycle, but in our ability to not hold on to the past so dearly lest that grip sap our energy stores.

Reviewing built-ins for the home, I have been vacillating on how much storage is necessary. Storage = accumulation = baggage and plenty of it. When my father bragged about 19 closets in the home he and Mom designed, I groaned. It was 19 closets that also had to be cleared. I look forward to clean spaces.  Less stuff, more life.

What if we gave of ourselves and not worried about what we left behind?  What if what matters is how well we loved, not how well we lived? How would we live then?

As for the dog, I suspect he will still have the run of the place. His antics bring a smile to all the faces in the family, an action worthy of preserving.

Reconstructing a Family

5/31/2012

“Reconstructing a Family”

We toured our “new” home yesterday, in a walk-through with the builder, to ensure we were working off the same blueprints. Save, improvise, innovate have been keywords as of late.

After touring the first and second floors, we ascended to the third, the former servants’ quarters. The back roofing had been removed, rafters reinforced, and the middle of the back wall had been broken down, bricks torn away to make space for a raised roof and observatory deck.

I posted the picture on Facebook and a few of my friends following this project commented on my “a real hole in the wall” caption.  One friend asked, “Is this the beginning, or are there many?”  This friend is, of course, one of my writer friends, inclined to ask the deeper questions, which in turn prompted me to wonder. When was the beginning of this project, how will we know the end?

After working feverishly on my first book six years ago, it was not until I wrote the ending, felt satisfied about the ending, that I had arrived at a station in life in which I had found peace. Perhaps not healing, for that goes on forever, but peace in the sense, I could sleep at night.  Peace in the sense of what one finds when traveling alone to Sante Fe, New Mexico.  From there, I knew I would begin the story, with a snippet from my time in Oceanside, Oregon.

Two years ago we began touring the Gateway Quarter, which parts of the OTR had been branded as such, to add luster to a part of town in need of shining up, “just to get out of the house in February”.  Now, our project of reconstructing an 1870s Italianate home in the very same neighborhood is in high gear. And still, when asked to tell the story of its beginnings, I cannot recall any anecdote that sums up this decision.

Perhaps it begins last night, when our third daughter graduated from high school, with high honors and even higher hopes.  Not only was the matriculation of number three worth contemplating in the how quickly the years had past, but my husband and I often fail to give ourselves credit for the time and effort to make this marriage work, to make this family bond, suffice it to say, that even a White Castle run, following graduation, and a sit-down at 10 p.m. with the kids counts towards this goal.  Every little action can quickly add or detract when the subject is stepfamilies.

Perhaps our reconstruction story begins with wanting something to call our own, since we each brought children into the marriage, but had none together. Perhaps it was a call to our inner artist, the city coaxing more out of us.  Perhaps it begins with fashioning a home where our growing and adult children can return to, a family home, not “their house” or “yours.”

I liken this reconstruction to that of building a family. The foundation of 1419 Race has existed, held up for 150 years.  The footprint of the original home is intact, with parlor situated in the front, along Race Street, though the dining room will become the kitchen, but we are not moving walls back or eliminating any, though we will open up the space and allow for the energy and light to pass through.

The summer kitchen fell down sometime ago.  We will replace it with a rooftop terrace.  And where servants certainly looked out from their third floor quarters to see the happenings in the back alley, we too will have a view of the alley, of Music Hall of the skyline in the city we have made home from our third floor observation deck.

We will sand some surfaces, paint others, replicate and replace where needed and possible.  We will adjust some of the exterior to conform to modern-day codes designed to preserve latter day traditions.

We will save as many bricks as possible for future use along the garage walls, courtyard, so that we may be conscious of the hands that formed and placed the bricks in their original location.

It is what any family does, especially those with bonus members, they smooth out the rough surfaces, adjust some things on the outside, try to hold on to past traditions, keep the walls, though parts of them need to come down.

Our son, a rising high school junior, recently told me, “I won’t be living here. I’ll just be staying here.”  Which is fine by me.  Our children’s lives should always be outside the walls of a family or home.  But when shelter is needed, they will have a place to stay.

Reconstruction, according to Websters refers to the “process by which the states that had seceded were reorganized as part of the Union after the Civil War.
The period during which this took place is 1865–77, which ironically is the period during which our home was constructed.

I like the idea of reconstructing a family, though no one seceded, we did have to reorganize and come into the union.

Fresh Light

Fresh Light
3/16/2012

The early morning darkness, a left over from the time change, gave way to a glint of sun, then a full-out encompassing rays.  As we stepped inside 1419, I was overwhelmed by the light, illuminating the scooped line of trim work above the parlor, the bricked in transom over the south-facing kitchen entry, and my state of mind.

If one can journey on a ray of light, then today I had. For the past weeks had been a journey downward, inward, one filled with anxiety over my parents’ health, was I doing enough, would it ever be enough?  Had I helped them onto a mistaken path?

For in this fresh light, I saw a different path. One filled with less regret and more acceptance. There really are stages for grief, even of the anticipatory type.  When my parents moved, I filled their days with lunches and groceries, and filled my head with notions of them being active, involved and social.  Six months passed, a few holidays and a few falls by my dad later, and I see them now where they are, coasting.

I am a pusher.  Of life.  When one has watched life being taken from you, you hold on to the rest. You decide you will not give up so easily. You push, you cajole, you move forward.  My days of running hurdles in junior high came in handy for this mindset. I live by it always, and sometimes stumble on the tenth hurdle and have to remove myself from the race. But always, I begin over at the starting line, and expect more, better, faster.

So naturally, I expect my parents to push, to exercise, see Cincinnati, even if through the windows of the bus, to find what life is left in them.  I want them out in the world to find what life is left in them. Instead, I am learning to love them where they live, a world inside, and for Mom in particular, a world inside themselves.

These were the thoughts I carried with me as I stepped through the threshold of 1419, and saw my new life exposed.  The construction workers had removed many of the boards off the windows, they too wanting to infuse some daylight into this old gal of a house.  For she really is a beauty with soaring windows,  scalloped designs on the side of the staircase, quaint views of downtown and Music Hall, and layers of wallpaper extending from ink fountains, to stripes to florals.

What I also saw that day, was a life without my parents.  Not to be morbid, though my mother and I used to joke about how many years she had left, when she was only in her sixties.  But I understood the timing of the completion of this home, to be mid-fall, and our estimated move in date to follow over a year or two later, would coincide with a gradual diminishment of the life left for my parents.

That they would not be there, to celebrate, to watch this beauty as it is returned to its original stately manner.  That my father could not navigate the steep narrow steps. Of course, I fully understand that Enzo, the dog, will need rest areas at the top and bottom of each set of steps as well.  These thoughts entered my mind.  Though Mom no longer cooks, that she would not be in the kitchen trying to help, by tasting the food, habits she picked up from us, I am sure.  That there is a life of mine that they will not be a part of.

When I escort them to my present home, they are comfortable.  To this point, sometimes Mom walks up the steps into Davis’ bedroom where she and Dad used to sleep in the past, when they were guests.  This has caused some dismay for Davis now that he is a teenager, but we mostly laugh at this action and escort Mom back down.

Mom knows where the bananas are, how to access the cookies and cereal, and how to open the sliding door and step out onto the patio.  Dad knows which chairs are helpful to him rising and which are not.

When I was ten, I rode my bike from Ridgeland Drive to Lincoln Street, where my parents were building the new family home.  Each trip, I envisioned this new life, while mourning the old.  Once the home was constructed and paint added, I came to accept this move as a betterment for our family.  I had my own room, painted yellow. With six bedrooms, the home resembled a bed and breakfast, for Mom too.

But Mom and Dad can’t ride their bikes to my new home, nor can I for that matter.  They can’t see what we see in the revitalization of the urban core.  Most of our friends think we are crazy, I would expect nothing less from my parents.

But mostly, at nights end, we will not hug each other good night. I will not rouse up blankets for them, or hear Mom in the middle of night, waking up one of the kids, wondering where she is.  The Easter egg tree has been forgotten this year, and there won’t be one where we are heading. The vast park down the street will have to step up and play the role of Easter Bunny.

A part of me recognizes their presence may not make it self known at 1419.  But in the interim, I will drag them down to the home as it is under construction, in the same manner in which I rode my bike to their new home.  I will repeat over and again, the history of 1419, the new restaurants sprouting up the street, the return of Washington Park's bandstand, and how we are only caretakers of homes and families, for the time God grants.

Green House, Pink Door

2/11/2012

Lately, I find, I am introducing myself in third person objective, as in, “Hi, Annette Wick, green house, pink door.” I don’t know when I slipped inside that edifice and began to associate myself as one with this house, but for the better part of three or four years, the house itself had hidden behind a pink door, painted by Keep Cincinnati Beautiful programs, dedicated to improving a community’s environment.

The green facade, probably came along in the 1970s. An absentee landlord, perhaps wanting to hide from the IRS, took on Kelly Green Notre Dame and imagined hiding behind the purity of the color.  And the house has remained Kelly green.

As the new owner, let me first address the Kelly Green issue.  Marion L. Steele High School Amherst Comet Colors were green and gold.  Since my days as cheerleader, volleyball player, spirit wearer, no one could convince me that I looked hot in Kelly Green. Only redheads or deep brunettes looked good in Kelly Green. I was neither.

It strikes me as funny we might even be drawn to this historic home which had been wrongly painted Kelly green. But now the house’s colors have become iconic in the neighborhood.  Every one, including the Street Vibes vendor, knows which house is the green house.

Along came KCB, and painted the door a bright pink, as if to attract more attention to this Italianate wonder.  Last weekend, during our open house before reconstruction, a friend of mine came up the walk, and said, “Tell me this has a pink door.” I swung the door partially closed, to prove she was at the right address.  Sue had photographed the house, and those pictures were now hanging in a local coffee shop. Before she ever knew this one was mine.  The focal point?  The pink door.

I plan to keep the pink door. I want to hang it in the girl’s room, or perhaps in the basement, in the wine cellar.  Its so unbelievably feminine, and I HATE pink, not because of pink-washing, though I hate that too. My dislike stems from being the second girl in the birth order. The first girl got pink.  I got yellow. Each color suited our personalities, but I decided some where about 2^nd grade that I would protest the color pink all the days of my life.  At least now, I can choose.  I will save the door, but choose to banish the color pink to the basement.

As for the new color palette, I was shopping for cocktail napkins for the open house,  at local party store recently.  I was thinking purple.  My friends know I love purple. My husband does not buy red flowers for me on Valentine’s Day, but he does buy flowers in the purple scheme.

I found a few striped options, and one floral. The floral theme seemed to match more the style of the proposed home, so I picked up 100 count and left.  The morning following the party, I had tossed the extra napkins in the napkin holder on the breakfast table.  Mark was seated next to me. We were both reading the paper.  I looked up and begin staring off into the woods, thoughts from the previous night’s open house running through my mind.  Green house, pink door, green house, pink door. The refrain was beginning to sound like a John Cougar Mellencamp song.

I absentmindedly reached for a napkin to dab at my lips, when a new thought cut in.  The color schematic on this napkin would be absolutely perfect for the Italianate details that adorned our new home.  There was a deep eggplant background, with deep tan and beige flowers. At the center or stigma of each petaled flower, a dark spot, almost black-like purple.

“Here’s the color scheme for the home’s exterior…” I said aloud, and tossed the napkin into Mark’s lap.  He immediately responded with a nod.  He knows I am sold on anything purple, and its important to keep me buying in.  We later showed the napkin to the builder’s interior designer, who has yet to share it with the builder, until she has a chance to flesh out the schematics more.

In the interim, we attended another open house, one for the businesses located in the new Sangerhalle, diagonally down the street from our home.  As we circulated amongst business owners and associates, I once again, began introducing myself as a new owner of a home in OTR.  When asked “where?”, I once again held out my hand, “Hi Annette Wick, green house, pink door.”  The intended target of my handshake shook his head in recognition, not of my name, but of my place.

The green house, pink door, has become a reference point for many working in the neighborhood, from construction workers at Washington Park, Music Hall musicians, drivers heading south down Race from Findlay Market. 

Though drivers, pedestrians and neighbors alike might be lost without the green house as orientation, they will learn to love purple instead.

Consignment

The days dawns an unfamiliar purple,
shedding darkness of the winter sky.
We will toast to a rare warmth today -
and a home to be occupied later.

I have spoken soulfully of homes -
what do they mean -
on an ocean’s side,
or a looming shadow in a small town,
or the home I presently sit in
which has reinvented itself -
refuge, reception, reality, retreat.

Now shards of sunlight
break through the deepness,
punctuating what was supposed
to be a welcomed silence
after the children were gone.

We will trade in emptiness
for consecration
and the commotion of the city,
a gangland some still see it as.

Today only the dog breaks the hush,
in his unspoken pact to protect me.
In his tomorrow, and mine,
there will be many dogs and smells
to compete with my attention.

I don’t know how I will dwell,
In this new place we are making.
I feel only a heightened awareness
of someone re-purposing her life.

2/3/2012 AJW

I Got My Designs on You

6/11/11

Finally, we wrote the check. It has only taken months for us to do so. It took some level of embarrassment on our part, for while we were chatting with mere acquaintances, we found ourselves telling them, in the midst of a Findlay Market tour, that our interest in downtown was serious. We were planning to buy a home on OTR.

They found this surprising, that we could wax poetically about the history of the home, its former occupants, our plans for a rooftop deck, and yet, had not put one penny down towards future ownership.

So, Mark placed the call to the developer and told him we were ready to meet. We had already seen a few incarnations of plans, but now, it was official. With our check, they could move forward with an actual cost estimate, which for some silly reason, banks and builders need, and we could, in good faith, go on discussing the merits of living downtown.

Ironically, the timing also came on the heels of Mark spraying the clover in our yard, killing more grass than weed. I joked that, from ten thousand feet, the dead grass intermingled with the healthy grass, resembled the leprechaun of the Fighting Irish, replete with green and gold, well brown. Thankfully, a move downtown will prevent Mark from future lawn care gaffes such as this.

I can already hear strains of Country Roads, which Mark can regale the locals with his guitar version, while perched on the rooftop observation deck. Davis and Kaitlyn can pick out their room colors, for they will be the only ones returning with any frequency, to this particular home. And me, I will take time off now, knowing the novel that will write itself upon my occupancy of the second floor study, in full view of the rose window of Music Hall, with the Pinstripes or Seedy Seeds playing in concert at Washington Park. And Enzo will sleep, following our sojourns around the city. His selection of garbage on the streets will be much more appetizing than the occasional pizza box here.