A EULOGY FOR A MANOR HOUSE
Everyone has a happy place, usually somewhere from childhood. When we are overwhelmed by life, we retreat to that place seeking comfort only those guaranteed places can provide us with.
My happy place was a house – more than a house, a manor really. And more than the house itself – the vast yard and farm around it. As a very young child, before my parents bought their first home, we lived in that house. It was built in rural NY in 1914 – At the hight of anglo american civilization. At the last possible moment before the fall of western civilization and the great european civil war. It was a monument to the last gasp of the agrarian age of western man — before the industrialization of the war converted us from a farming society to a manufacturing one, and before the postwar converted our homes into post-war panel-products instead after centuries of wood and brick.
The house’s name was “Sunny Lee”. It was a large stucco house with a barn out back. About 6000 square feet of home. It had been designed brilliantly for a working-farm summer house for urbanite New Yorkers. Porches on either side. And a central living area that could be closed off in the cooler weather. Beautiful walnut bookcases. Elegant bannisters and trim. Fireplaces everywhere. A smokehouse out back. Bedrooms for family and staff. The yard had been planted Victorian style, with chestnuts, pines, and oaks, cherry’s and lilacs – back when ornamental meant something of a much greater scale that it does in this suburban era. Back when people thought in acres and seasons, not square feet and weeks.
After the war started, the house was boarded up. It was vacant until the late 1950s when a family bought it and renovated it to use as their farm house. We only lived there for a few years while my father started his business downtown, and before my parents bought their first house. I slept in a bedroom on the third floor. And I used to believe the house was haunted. The attic was off the upstairs bath and the keyhole flickered with the movements of a tree outside the attic window, looking as if someone was always behind the door watching or moving. The closet in my bedroom didn’t have a light and each change of clothes was an expedition into the unknown. It was a very big house, and that one flight of stairs was a very, very far distance to walk for a frightened five year old in search of his mother after waking from a nightmare. But those scary bits live alongside the joy of getting lost in cornfields. Of sun on chestnuts. Of a tire swing on an oak tree. Of the sheer size of the great trees. Of the rich smell of lilacs. Of cutting a finger on a broken truck’s window. Of picking and eating cherries. Of the smell of hay and oats in the barn. As sliding down the bannister over my mother’s half hearted objections while holding back a smile. As sitting in front of the fire listening to fairy tales on cold winter night. As wrapped in a knitted blanket at three a.m. while she rocked me through an ear-ache. As Running across the spring lawn into the bright morning sun.
Growing up, and especially after we moved away, I always dreamed of buying the house someday. So that I could find my happy place – and maybe make it real once again. And about three years ago it went up for sale. I flew back to look at it. Houses in certain parts of the country absurdly cheap, and western NY is one of them. There is nothing up there but farms, so the Mennonites gravitate there because of the cheap land. I took videos of the house, and went through it making a list of what had to be done. Walls had to be removed to restore it to it’s original beauty. Baths updated. Plumbing, electrical and heat all had to be replaced. The trees that had reached maturity were grown weak, lifeless and broken. The barn had fallen off it’s foundation and sagged. The stucco needed loving care. So I did the math, and no matter what I did, it didn’t work out. So I gave up my a dream. Grudgingly I passed on my dream of owning my happy-place. It would have to live on as a memory that I tended to and loved in a way that the house could never experience.
I got an email from the real estate agent today, telling me that she’d thought of me. She said someone had bought the house that year. Shortly after, a fire had started. The owners got out alive – barely. they were rescued from the roof. I found some photos and a short grainy video. The house was entirely gutted.
As a house, as a manor, it had a hard life. It was built as elegantly as the times allowed. It was aspirational. It was designed with thought and wrought with craftsmanship. It raised but one family in its less than a century of life. And the house died at night in it’s sleep, never having achieved it’s ambitions, and never fulfilling it’s purpose. Despite the good intentions and lofty ambitions that had been put into it.
I’m sad for that house. I loved it. I’ll do a little quiet mourning for it. Be a little thankful for it. And appreciate that it lives on as my happy place.
Link
http://www.mpnnow.com/news/x1692323518/Two-daring-fire-rescues-keep-Ontario-County-crews-busy-throughout-the-morning
Source date (UTC): 2012-01-04 02:35:00 UTC