Day 1082
The Yucky House, the Beatrice house, Howl, my dream house...
You would think that since I am playing at being a writer, getting to 'The End' would not be as big of a deal as this feels to me. It has been nearly three years ago, since we first held the keys to our new house. As I write this now, I am looking at a picture of the house that we took the first time we went to look at it. Earlier this evening as I sat in the bath tub, with bubbles, candles, and music I was thinking of just what I would write. The words were easier when they were just in my head. But now as I see them on the screen, they are becoming even more real. And it is harder to do.
But I received a couple of email this past couple of weeks about my house from Jonathan. First there was some confusion about someone breaking in and stealing my bath tub. This just seemed totally absurd to me. I mean really, my claw foot bath tub up on second floor. I wondered who would do such a thing. When I finally was able to talk to the police officer, I found out that it wasn't quite what I had thought. Someone did take the bath tub. But not as much as breaking and entering as I had thought. The city had scheduled my house for demolition. They must have opened it up to anyone who might have wanted something in there. Still all of this gave me a feeling of numbness.
The second email from Jonathan was telling that the house was no longer there. Everything was gone. And this was even more of a feeling...much to hard to use a word or two of explanation. My blog here, has told what we did, what we planned on doing. But I do not think it truly shows what that house was to me. For me to now get to “The End” I need to write about it. I need to see those words. I need to know that they are safe in the box, there for me to pull out again if I need to.
March has been a month for me. Wow. I have been thinking about Howl a lot this month. The weather has been warm. It was time to make another trip to Beatrice to get the last of my things from the house. We were going to get the hard things, the big things. The wood burning stoves, the corn stove, the brand new water heater, and whatever else we thought I might be able to sell.
Not only this, I had dreams of the house still. I wished for something. I held it there in my mind as this thing that might still be if I could just work it out right. Though I knew that I never would be able to do that.
My Yucky House was not just a house to me. It had always been a symbol. It had in someways been my life. Before my Yucky House, Jonathan had 'left' me twice. But this second time, when he came home, I thought things were good. I believed that we were better. I knew that it was going to work. We made plans. We did not want to live in our 1970's split entry house... a house that is exactly like every other house on our block. We had never thought we would live there forever. We looked at other houses. We looked at what we could do to this house to make it better for us. We even decided to buy land and build a castle. Now you might think that I am exaggerating when I say CASTLE. But I am not. I have pins on my googlemaps, showing pieces of land that we thought would be good sites for our castle. We were going to watch for these pieces of land to go on sale. While we were waiting, we drew up several different castle plans/designs. One of the most important things was that we needed to be able to live in part of the castle as we worked to build the rest of it. We had to be able to do the work, or at least most of it ourselves. We did so much research on this. It was quite an exciting time.
As our search of land expanded, we found on craiglist a house in Beatrice. A three-story Victorian house in desperate need of love and attention. Here our castle...or plan for the future changed just a bit. We went to see this house. Now some of this might just be in my blog. But I have need to speak about it again. We took my camera. We took tons of pictures. We needed to see the good things, the bad things, and most of all the scary things. This house had been turned into 4 apartments. The people who owned it now had been trying to make it back into one house. The same thing that we would do.
The house was terrible. It was filled with crap. There was trash and junk in every room. The roof was leaking. Windows were broken and boarded up. Animals had clearly been living in the house. I loved it! When we drove home after looking at the house, I knew I wanted that house. I almost cried as we drove back to Hickman and our plain ordinary house.
Jonathan and I had a lot of things to talk about. We had a lot of things to research. We had a lot of things to plan. But this could be our castle. It would take nearly as much work as it would have to actually build our castle from scratch. But this house... this was something real. We could touch it, we could see it, and most importantly, we could do it now. We did not have to wait until we had money saved up to buy the land.
We borrowed the money against Jonathan's 401K. It was ours. When we looked at the house we could see two visions of the house. The yuck that was there and the beauty that would be there. I would sit in rooms and just feel them. I was learning things about my house. I found out secrets by doing this. I found doors that had been hidden and covered up years ago. I found fireplaces. There were secrets everywhere.
When I think about Howl, I also find that I miss Myrta. She believed in me. Part of me feels like I am letting her down because of all of this as well. And I hate that. When I showed Myrta around my Yucky House, we would walk into one room and she would stop. She would ask me, what do you see here. She did this because she knew that I didn't see the yucky tile on the floor or the leaky roof. She knew that when I looked at that room I saw what it was going to be. And Myrta saw that too, through my eyes. She believed that I could and would make it happen. When I lost her, that was hard. That whole year was hard... 6 funerals in 6 months. But I still had my family, and my dreams.
Now I have written a great deal about what we did with that house in the year and a half that we worked on it. I don't want to go into that here. But as we worked that house became a part of me. I could almost feel it. Once when the kids and I were sitting there, the wind was blowing outside. Inside this air movement was causing the plastic that we had covering the walls and insulation was moving. I saw this as Howl breathing. And I told my kids that. It was as if the house was alive to us. Every bucket of paster that we carried out, every yucky thing we removed, every thing we fixed, every thing we added... it was all making him wake up. He had been sad for so long. But now we were there and we loved him.
This is part of the reason that all of this hurts me so much. That Yucky House was more real to me than many things are. I said before that it was a symbol. And it is not just me that thought this. Jonathan saw this himself. We talked about it. Our house and the work that we were putting into it was like a symbol of our life. Of our marriage. It had been broken. It had been falling apart. But we had grabbed ahold of it. It was important to us and we were fixing it. We had these dreams and these plans for the future. Howl was going to be there helping us to get these things. So every thing we did in that house, it was like we were fixing ourselves. And it was good. That is why I could carry 10,000 buckets of plaster down three flights of stairs. It is why I could live with bats flying around my bedroom at night. It is why I could make it through the winter that reminded me of Laura homesteading on the prairie. (sleeping in gloves and stocking hats. Snow falling in the bathroom. Freezing.) All of that was worth what I was getting back.
But then in August 2010, when Jonathan and I sat there in our future dining room / current gym and fire wood storage room, everything changed. Everything fell apart, again. And this time it wasn't just my husband and my marriage that I was losing. I had believed. And still it was all crumbling away. And this time, more than anything I knew that I couldn't do that again. Never again.
We waited. We talked to each other. We talked to the kids. Then the kids and I packed up and moved into my parents house. They have not been back to our Beatrice House since. (And I have not told them what has happened to Howl. It would just make them sad. Every once in a while one of them will mention the house, want to go back there.) I have been back several times. It is hard. It gives me true physical pain to go there. But I had stuff there. I needed to go and get my things. I needed to be able to say goodbye. I needed to cry.
I guess I still need to do that. I am now getting to “The End.” The house is gone. All of it is completely gone. Nothing can change that now. Before Howl, my Yucky house, I don't think I really knew what I wanted. Now, that knowledge warps and twists everything. I was so close to having this thing that I wanted. I was climbing the top of that hill. And it was taken away. This is why I had thought that I wished that year and a half would just disappear. This pain, the loss I feel... I would never have known that if we had never held the keys to my dream house.
I have been writing a lot since coming to live at my parents' house. The first thing that I wrote here, it is also the first book that I finished. This book is to me so linked to how I was feeling. It is linked to my Howl and all that had happened. My book, “Uncle Drew and the Burnt Pancakes,” is in so many ways about all of this. Of course, Bella actually does get to live in her three-story Victorian dream house. But that is good. I wouldn't want it any other way. Even that was a stupid fantasy of mine... if I could get my books published and start making money that way... maybe I could fix my house. Maybe I could still live there. Or at least I could go and get all of the carefully removed woodwork and use it in a house here. I could then at least bring part of Howl here. But no. It won't be that way.
But this is truly The End. From here I have to start over. I need to figure out what I want and what I can do and try to make those come out to be as close as possible.
My beautiful, shimmering ice castle
Melting in the afternoon sun.
I am sorry I couldn't make it real.
Goodbye Howl...
