Sometime in the early 90s, an exchange student from Germany who had lived with my family for a short time in the late high school years returned to the States and he made his way to Philadelphia to stay with me for a couple days. Most of his experience in this country had been in the wilds of affluent suburbia and he was anxious to see how my life in the big city had organized itself. Being a hostess par excellence I took him on all kinds of outings to see my favorite bar (the now late great and much lamented Chestnut Street Bar and Grill, known informally as Cheese Bags), South Street, the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. As we toured the last of these I became a little self-conscious of the "President Kennedy Stood Here on a Tuesday"-type plaques that dot the sidewalk. Inside we suffered from a very poor docent whose disdain for her patrons could not possibly have been more obvious. But the pointlessness of the exercise was thrust upon me when the docent pointed out a chair (with obligatory don't-sit-here gold braiding across the seat) and remarked with great reverence that said chair was "nearly two hundred years old" at which point my guest leaned into me and whispered that the town in which he had grown up had recently celebrated its, like, 1,375th anniversary. I rolled my eyes and took him back to Cheese Bags.
I share this story with you only because I had a similar, if more literary, experience this afternoon and I am feeling the same sense of, well, I don't know what to call the feeling. Perhaps you can help name it.
I'm reading this book by a woman named Judy Corbett called Castles In The Air and within the first pages I am completely engrossed and embark on a plan of maternal neglect and excessive video for the kids so I can spend as much time reading as possible. The book is a wonder, a memoir (yikes!) of time spend by the author and her husband purchasing and renovating a 450 year old mansion (described as a "castle" by some) in Wales. Along the way there are ghosts, roast peacocks, entire rooms of ornament to track down - all the way in America! - and all manner of interesting characters. In some ways, the tale is no different than any one of hundreds of recountings of restoration of some grand country house outside some quaint village populated by colorful townies who behave in uniformly inscrutable fashions. But that's not my point.
My point, which I promise I am rapidly approaching, is that Brainiac and I have a long and storied history together of causing whisper, concern and consternation among our friends and family with our general preference for the old, worn and used. I haunt thrifts and Goodwill, he knows every junkyard from here to Pittsburgh and which specializes in just the kind of gear he needs to do whatever project he's got underway. From cars to books to clothes to, well, just about anything, we go for used much faster than new just about every time. And, unlike Second Hand Rose, we like old and used just fine. So when we announced to all that we had taken a lease in this quite rundown and recently abandoned, but with fabulous potential, 200-some-odd year-old farmhouse there wasn't much surprise. Sighs, perhaps. But no surprise.
And there's been little surprise, either, as I report that we've identified the places in the floor where we really shouldn't walk because a complete breakthrough threatens, that Brainiac replaced some of the rubberized wiring, that there's an add liquid dripping from the fireplace in the kitchen. Just more sighs, mostly, and a quiet encouragement to look into the new builds going up along Route 100. We let such comments roll off of us, because people who aren't old house people can't be made into such and people who are seldom change.
So when I read in Castles In The Air that Peter, the author's husband
would be happy to fall in with anything, provided the house was pre-1670 and had held Royalist allegiance during the Civil War; living in a Parliamentarian house was out of the question.
I felt that not only Judy Corbett is a kindred spirit, but also that I was way out of my league old house-wise. These people are restoring a house that dates to 1555 and which housed some of Wales' most influential families. By the time they had found it, the house had become a kind of nightclub-flophouse with a plastic skeleton chained in the basement and more than one ghost in residence.
Once again I am reminded that old is entirely a matter of perspective.
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