Here We Are, Still, Again
Oh, hello! It’s been a while. So many things have happened since I wrote to you last January, yet so little has changed. Medical miracles abound, yet we remain stuck in this limbo, relying on the common decency of a lot of people who don’t have any. My beautiful youngest child is still struggling with nearly annihilating anxiety, but that struggle has shifted into a more positive and proactive context. My house got some fixing and needs some more, but less than I would like, because we had to take that child out of school around the time we last met here, and start over again in August. I have said, aloud, many times over on social media, “I don’t think I will survive this,” about the brutal overlap of pandemic and parenting. I am still here.
Covid has unmoored me from time in a way that feels dangerous, so I haven’t made as much stuff in the last several months as I usually might. One reason I make stuff is to unmoor myself from time just enough to release my inventive brain from its regularly scheduled cage; I make sure my kids are taken care of and no time-sensitive work is bearing down and I let an afternoon stretch long before me, its horizon too distant to see, and I meander toward it instead of the running/pushing/grasping of work. The physical aspect—engaging my hands, moving them, generating blood flow—matters a lot. That I can still do. But the last time I found myself this disengaged from time as a baseline way of being, as the pandemic has left me now, I meandered right into a full-blown nervous breakdown, dropped out of college, and nearly ruined my life. That was the one and only time my mother’s horribleness turned beneficial: I moved home from campus and saw how urgently I needed to get away from her, got two jobs, appealed my academic status and financial aid revocation, and was back living on campus after a single semester instead of the expected year.
We humans need time, structure, framing the way houses need studs and joists and columns and sturdy foundations. I learned something fascinating since I last wrote to you about my house, and about almost all houses of its era. Built in 1901, my house has what’s called a balloon frame. Before the industrial revolution made nails widely available and cheap, houses were built by master housewrights who fit frames together without nails or screws, like three-dimensional puzzles. Framing wood was carved to fit together seamlessly and without movement. The process was expensive, time-consuming, and required the housewright’s specialized skills in the planning stage and on the building site. Sometime after 1880, metal nails and mass sawmilling became widely available, and the predominant building method shifted to houses like mine: balloon houses, until sometime around 1930, when multi-story houses began to be built in layers. “Balloon” house was a derogatory term for the newfangled, faster building method, intended to suggest that these houses would all simply blow away, floating into the atmosphere. 120 years later, mine hasn’t. Not yet.
In a balloon house, if you haven’t added insulation, you can stand in the attic and drop a marble down the outer wall all the way to the basement. The outer studs are about twenty-five feet long. Kind of amazing, right? And yet, there’s a danger: each of those bays between the studs is a fire corridor. If a spark catches in the basement it can travel up a single stud bay to the roof like the house drawing a breath. Fiberglass insulation can slow it down, but the only way to completely eliminate the design flaw is to add horizontal lengths of 2 x 4 between each stud, level with the floor joists, to box each stud bay in and close the house’s airway, so that it can’t breathe fire into its own hat.
Our house has insulation, or at least most of it does. And it has survived some kind of fire in the past, possibly caused by one of the four wood-burning fireplaces being carelessly used. Shitty electrical wiring. A cooking mishap. I assume we’ll never know, though at our last house, a former resident showed up out of the blue one day and told us the story of that house’s fire and how it resulted in the giant kitchen that we loved so much. You never know what kind of story is going to arrive on your doorstep. I’m guessing, from the fact that one of the chimneys was recently rebuilt, that the fire here was fireplace-related. Maybe someone was burning love letters. A teen daughter torching photos of a bad boyfriend. Maybe someone was desperate, in this great big leaky house, to keep warm, huddled too close with too many blankets.
This summer we had some repairs made on that roof, and the other two chimneys, gutters, soffit ventilation. We also painted it pink, which was a big, beautiful, expensive ordeal that has made me almost endlessly happy. Here are before and after photos:
I have spent too much time in the house this year. But I am still a little bit afraid to be anywhere else. My children have each had one shot of their vaccine, and will get the second the day before Thanksgiving. By the older one’s seventh birthday in mid-December, we will be collectively inoculated. But it’s impossible to say when we will be re-tethered to the structures of daily life that keep us from floating away from the surface of our lives. Soon, I hope. Soon soon soon.