Like_Frank_Gehry_On_A_Speedball
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My childhood home is the bastard love child of M.C. Escher and MTV Cribs.
Spiral staircases abut antique phone booths. A hydraulic dentist chair, complete with x-ray machine, stands guard over the cast iron chimenea. If there were ever any doors closing off any one part of the house from the other, outside of our bedrooms, I'm too young to remember it.
This house had always taken on the feeling of a gigantic art project in motion. Once, when my brother was three, he took a long nap. My parents looked at each other, feeling each passing minute drifting away like lost opportunity. When their son woke up, the ceiling was gone.
My mother and father first moved here because they saw the back yard, a one acre forest, and said: we can build things here. The house steadily expanded onwards and upwards, as it was decided that perhaps ten skylights weren't enough, that maybe a balcony could be cute, and do we really need that wall there? My parents never thought to actually hire anybody to this end: they could both swing hammers, and even a four year old can fetch a box of nails.
As a child, I remember a paper model of our house, that our father poured over seemingly every week. It was a precise scale replica, comprised of individual movable parts, constructed with nothing but an ExactoKnife and inhuman patience. It was our own personal ship in the bottle, and I watched it grow. Every time Dad struck upon a new idea, the model would rearrange itself like an architectural Transformer. And within six months, and through a flurry of grout and band saws, our house followed suit. We lived in a three-story Rubik's Cube.
It took us a year to dig the swimming pool. This is not bad turnaround, when you consider that we had four shovels and a wheelbarrow to our name, and that we had to drag a hundred pound. tree stump out of a five-foot hole with the lawn mower. We took the opportunity to extend the porch, through which our father built a pumping system: the sun would heat the porch, and the porch would heat the water. As a finishing touch, the blissfully warm water was reintroduced into an elevated pond and rock garden, from which it cascaded over a plexiglass waterfall.
Somewhere in there, child labor laws were violated. I was ten.
This is what we do for fun: we build. You imagine, you make plans, and finally you get off your ass and get to work. My brothers had bugged my father for years to build a secret passage, because a childhood imagination demands nothing less. By the time I was thirteen, Dad had removed a section of the wall downstairs, replaced it with a camouflaged door, and installed a lever system on the other side. By tilting the frame of a Japanese print, the wall would swing inward, revealing to us our pantry, filled with soda and applesauce.
Obviously, we could never get our friends to leave. Sleepovers sprawled through the living room and up the stairs, until some nights it looked like a preteen hobo training camp. I would wake up in the middle of the night to get a drink, and would hear familiar voices in a far corner of the house: my friends had jumped the fence and let themselves in through the back door.
Staring in through our backyard window stood a six-foot bear, standing on his hind legs, maw wide open. This bear was carved out of a single tree with a chainsaw, and he greeted us from the side of the road every time we visited our grandmother. Eventually, his feet rotted out, and it feel over on some neighborhood twelve-year old, breaking half of him - the kid, not the bear. The only thing left to do was strap the offending grizzly to a flatbed trailer, and escort him to his new home in our backyard. A woodpecker moved into his shoulder a month later.
Our own nest could not last forever. Children grow up, get cocky, and move on to conquer the world. A house which was designed around a family - two parents and three absurd boys - suddenly feels cavernous. By the time I was twenty-one and already living in New York, the house was sold, and my parents shuffled off like hermit crabs who had outgrown their shell.
The couple who bought the house had lived in the neighborhood for ten years, and their hearts had leaped every time they had driven by. They have three children: two girls, and a boy.
My childhood home is the bastard love child of M.C. Escher and MTV Cribs.
Spiral staircases abut antique phone booths. A hydraulic dentist chair, complete with x-ray machine, stands guard over the cast iron chimenea. If there were ever any doors closing off any one part of the house from the other, outside of our bedrooms, I'm too young to remember it.
This house had always taken on the feeling of a gigantic art project in motion. Once, when my brother was three, he took a long nap. My parents looked at each other, feeling each passing minute drifting away like lost opportunity. When their son woke up, the ceiling was gone.
My mother and father first moved here because they saw the back yard, a one acre forest, and said: we can build things here. The house steadily expanded onwards and upwards, as it was decided that perhaps ten skylights weren't enough, that maybe a balcony could be cute, and do we really need that wall there? My parents never thought to actually hire anybody to this end: they could both swing hammers, and even a four year old can fetch a box of nails.
As a child, I remember a paper model of our house, that our father poured over seemingly every week. It was a precise scale replica, comprised of individual movable parts, constructed with nothing but an ExactoKnife and inhuman patience. It was our own personal ship in the bottle, and I watched it grow. Every time Dad struck upon a new idea, the model would rearrange itself like an architectural Transformer. And within six months, and through a flurry of grout and band saws, our house followed suit. We lived in a three-story Rubik's Cube.
It took us a year to dig the swimming pool. This is not bad turnaround, when you consider that we had four shovels and a wheelbarrow to our name, and that we had to drag a hundred pound. tree stump out of a five-foot hole with the lawn mower. We took the opportunity to extend the porch, through which our father built a pumping system: the sun would heat the porch, and the porch would heat the water. As a finishing touch, the blissfully warm water was reintroduced into an elevated pond and rock garden, from which it cascaded over a plexiglass waterfall.
Somewhere in there, child labor laws were violated. I was ten.
This is what we do for fun: we build. You imagine, you make plans, and finally you get off your ass and get to work. My brothers had bugged my father for years to build a secret passage, because a childhood imagination demands nothing less. By the time I was thirteen, Dad had removed a section of the wall downstairs, replaced it with a camouflaged door, and installed a lever system on the other side. By tilting the frame of a Japanese print, the wall would swing inward, revealing to us our pantry, filled with soda and applesauce.
Obviously, we could never get our friends to leave. Sleepovers sprawled through the living room and up the stairs, until some nights it looked like a preteen hobo training camp. I would wake up in the middle of the night to get a drink, and would hear familiar voices in a far corner of the house: my friends had jumped the fence and let themselves in through the back door.
Staring in through our backyard window stood a six-foot bear, standing on his hind legs, maw wide open. This bear was carved out of a single tree with a chainsaw, and he greeted us from the side of the road every time we visited our grandmother. Eventually, his feet rotted out, and it feel over on some neighborhood twelve-year old, breaking half of him - the kid, not the bear. The only thing left to do was strap the offending grizzly to a flatbed trailer, and escort him to his new home in our backyard. A woodpecker moved into his shoulder a month later.
Our own nest could not last forever. Children grow up, get cocky, and move on to conquer the world. A house which was designed around a family - two parents and three absurd boys - suddenly feels cavernous. By the time I was twenty-one and already living in New York, the house was sold, and my parents shuffled off like hermit crabs who had outgrown their shell.
The couple who bought the house had lived in the neighborhood for ten years, and their hearts had leaped every time they had driven by. They have three children: two girls, and a boy.