I Am in Love with Houses

I’ve been in love with houses, even those I hated, which of course were the ones with all the possibilities. My grandparents lived next door to each other on South Garth Avenue—a settled and tree-lined neighborhood. One set of grandparents lived in House Beautiful (405 S. Garth) and the other in a beautiful house (403 S. Garth):  both craftsman-style with front porches and glassed-in “sleeping porches” above. Both with glorious secret places. The Browns’ house had beveled glass windows in the dining room. The stairs rose gracefully up two landings. The Simpiches’ house featured dark wood pillars separating the entryway from the living room. Each house had a fireplace and a sliding pocket door to the dining room.When my family moved to Arkansas and we lived that year in barracks-style student housing, it felt like camping out. I was eleven, and didn’t care, for a while. I liked the mud holes, the kids running loose through the neighborhood, and the furniture my parents ordered unassembled from Sears and my father put together. It was an adventure. After that was the tiny rental house just off campus and across the street from Mr. Mack’s tiny grocery, and then the flat subdivision house my parents bought on Maxwell Drive. Houses plucked down in a semicircle in a field, each a small variation on the next. Nothing to imagine, no way, it seemed, to make them sing. Or dance.  Hence, I guess, my longing.Longing for what? Not exactly for the mythical houses of my grandparents, the ones elevated in memory. Maybe for beauty itself. I’ve been passionate about every house I’ve lived in, even the one on Maxwell Drive, where I singlehandedly pruned the huge mass of irises along the driveway. I must have been fourteen. I think it was that same year, I had a friend whose name is now lost to me, who invited me to her house for the afternoon. Her family had rented a sad corner house not far from our school. I had the feeling that they moved often.  Her room had almost nothing in it but a bed and a turned-sideways wooden milk-crate thing for her dresser. Her clothes were few and worn. I remember her room because it had nothing in it. It echoed.  But there was that milk crate with a cloth on it and a few bottles on top and one necklace of blue beads. I thought how cute the crate was with its things arranged on it, how I would like to do that for myself. What I was feeling, as I think of it now, was that longing I mentioned, my need to gather, to see beauty or the reaching for beauty anywhere it could be found. I suddenly think of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “Filling Station” and want to hear the whole poem again:Filling StationOh, but it is dirty!--this little filling station,oil-soaked, oil-permeatedto a disturbing, over-allblack translucency.Be careful with that match!Father wears a dirty,oil-soaked monkey suitthat cuts him under the arms,and several quick and saucyand greasy sons assist him(it's a family filling station),all quite thoroughly dirty.Do they live in the station?It has a cement porchbehind the pumps, and on ita set of crushed and grease-impregnated wickerwork;on the wicker sofaa dirty dog, quite comfy.Some comic books providethe only note of color--of certain color. They lieupon a big dim doilydraping a taboret(part of the set), besidea big hirsute begonia.Why the extraneous plant?Why the taboret?Why, oh why, the doily?(Embroidered in daisy stitchwith marguerites, I think,and heavy with gray crochet.)Somebody embroidered the doily.Somebody waters the plant,or oils it, maybe. Somebodyarranges the rows of cansso that they softly say:ESSO--SO--SO--SOto high-strung automobiles.Somebody loves us all.