Rise - The Story of a House -Sample
The Story of a House and a Family Rising from the Dust
Introduction
The house stands sturdy and straight. To us—my four children and me—it is a marvel, as surreal and unlikely as an ancient colossus. It is our home, in the truest sense. We built it. Every nail, every 2 x 4, each three inch slice of hardwood flooring, has passed through our hands. Most pieces slid across our fingers multiple times as we moved material from one spot to another, installed it, ripped it out, and then tried again. Often the concrete and wood scraped flesh or hair, snagging physical evidence and vaulting it into the walls. Sometimes bits of wood or slivers of metal poked under our skin. I have shavings of house DNA permanently embedded inside my palm and dimpled forever in my left shin. The house wove us all together in this painful and intimate union, until we were a vital part of one another.
The idea of building our home came to me in the summer of 2007. I was newly divorced, with four amazing children: three rocketing through their teenage years, with a toddler sputtering in their tailwind, while I staggered unsteadily toward life as a single mother and a single woman. The kids and I had always been close, but the last year of the marriage had strained us to near breaking. I sensed that we had to define ourselves, as individuals and as a family.
I groped for something that would weave us together with a sense of purpose, something large and profound. We needed a place to live, and one evening that summer I imagined us working together, building our place, taking small pieces and fastening them together until they had grown into something much bigger than ourselves. The next day I discussed the idea with the three older children, and by that afternoon we had decided to do it.
I didn’t know yet how to frame a window or a door, how to snake pipes and wires through a wall, or how to draw up blueprints and permits. But I knew how to make a family, and I knew that this was right for us.
Our task was both simple and extreme. We needed sanctuary.
So we built it.
Chapter 1
When I was a child, my family lived on forty acres in rural Wisconsin. I grew up swinging wildly from the branches of young pines with my brother, John, who was three years older than me. Snoopy, a black, poodle mix, ran along the forest floor beneath us. Forty acres was Mom and Dad’s claim, but—land titles be damned—John and I staked out hundreds of country acres as our personal playground. For practical and survival reasons our most prized possessions were matching pocket knives. Dad had melted our names into the fake bone handles in crooked cursive. With these sharp little marvels we whittled spear tips, sawed ropes, and dug animal traps. And when the blades bent sideways, we hammered them flat on the anvil behind the garage. Occasionally, when our task demanded a larger blade, John snuck a rusty hatchet into our afternoon picnic satchel.
When friends or cousins came to play, I was perfectly comfortable climbing down from the trees to giggle and be a typical little girly-girl. I wore ribbons in my hair and fussed with dolls and Barbies, matching their shoes with their elaborately sequined gowns. This duality seemed perfectly natural. Of course it would, since my parents freely explored every facet of their own complex interests.
One cold November day, after a thin dust of snow had fallen, our family pulled the final load of firewood from the forest at the back of our land. John and I stacked wood in the trailer, and I was frustrated with the way the bark caught in the mittens I’d insisted on wearing instead of my work gloves. When I paused to pick slivers from the yarn, I watched Mom lift her half of a large log and feed it toward the two-foot open blade attached to the tractor. She was tough. She was the hardest working person I’d ever seen. Even from where I stood, not twenty feet away, I would have guessed her to be a small man by the fierce focus of her work. That same night, with Band-Aids on my slivered fingers, she took me to a neighbor’s house for a makeup party. I was the only child there, but she made me feel like I belonged. She giggled, and brushed delicate strokes of purple shadow above her eyes and mine. Her long dark hair had been washed free of sawdust and she let me experiment on it with braids and barrettes while she ordered lip gloss and blush. All evidence of her lumberjack morning had vanished, and she was simply a beautiful woman.
Weeks later, I watched Dad skin a deer, and then, while he took a hacksaw to the hind quarters, he told me about the county fair ribbons he’d won as a child for his hand-woven rugs. After we’d carved the meat and washed the kitchen table and our hands, he showed me how to cut strips of rags and fasten them together for weaving. It was a remarkable process and it changed my expectations of old clothes and rags, though I never really developed a passion for rugs. I did like to play with the bold solid fabrics, and selected bright pieces for my rug. When my attention wandered, Dad mixed floral stripes into my rug. This was no surprise; I knew how he loved flowers. In our vegetable garden, he spilled moss rose seeds at the ends of corn rows. Hollyhocks mixed equally with the beans. And petunias could show up anywhere, in the middle of the peas, just past the potatoes, or winding through the strawberry patch. We had very few gender specific expectations or limitations. Mom and Dad taught us that anything was possible with a little hard work.
John and I wanted desperately to believe that hard work would guarantee every sugar-coated desire. But we had missed our target often enough to have lingering doubts. For several of our elementary school years, we focused our energy toward a shared dream. We were building a real Native American teepee. Our biggest obstacle was the rawhide covering for the teepee. Despite our best efforts, our sling shots and homemade arrows hadn’t felled any deer or buffalo. Without the hides, our teepee would be nothing more than a skeleton pyramid of logs. So we started systematic hiking trips in search of a cotton field where I would weave yards of canvas for our teepee cover. Fields of cotton are pretty scarce in Wisconsin, but that didn’t slow us down much. When we were tired of hiking, we worked at the home site for the teepee, a flat spot that was covered in a carpet of moss—and only coincidently on our own land. John nicked away at trees and bushes with the dull hatchet, killing far more than he ever felled, while I wove pine branches between saplings for a wind barrier. And that was how it always was, he loved to take things apart, and I loved to put them together.
Midway through our teepee building craze, when I was six years-old, Mom’s latest order from her book club arrived on a warm August afternoon. It was one of those mail order clubs that offered steep discounts but sent unsolicited books every month that had to be returned at light speed or paid for. This slim hardcover was wrapped in a narrow belt of brown paper and destined to be returned before the pay date. I had to stretch on tiptoe, my nose even with the kitchen countertop, to pull the corner of the book out from under the rotary telephone. I ran my finger across the title, sounding out the words Mrs. Swanson had taught me through repetitious first grade phonics sessions, Make it Yourself. A blonde model wearing a crocheted blue sweater and a red handkerchief scarf, stood boldly below the title, her hands on her hips in a confident pose. Clearly, she could make anything she wanted to. I tried to slide off the paper band without snapping the glued seal—just one quick peek. But the book club president was keen to peepers like me and everything unraveled at once. Before I knew what had happened, I was cross-legged on the kitchen floor flipping through color images and diagrams of things I could make for myself. I was shamefully aware that we would have to pay for the book, but also determined to make good use of my time with it before Mom discovered my treachery.
The idea of making things for myself had my ears thrumming with excitement. If I worked through all the pages, surely I’d be able to twist enough yarn together to make a knitted cover for our teepee.
As quiet as an Indian running through the forest, I scurried down the dark concrete staircase into our basement. This was the first time I had ever braved the staircase without my brother or Snoopy the Fearless. Sweat trickled down my left temple and my heart raced. The heavy, spring-hinged door thudded ominously behind me as the light sputtered, wiggling shadows along the walls. My hands shook so badly that I almost dropped the book and fled back up the stairs. But I had always been a determined child, or that’s what Mom said whenever Grandma muttered that I was as stubborn as a mule. So I lifted my chin and ran toward the far wall where Mom had built a full, wall-sized storage unit. The shelves were piled with her art and craft supplies. I grabbed a few things, and found a good hiding place. I was positively desperate to make something.
I’ve no idea how long I struggled in a dark corner with the orange ball of yarn and two long thin paintbrushes that I held upside down as make-shift knitting needles. Several times things became hopelessly knotted, and I sawed the paintbrushes free with my pocket knife. I was positively terrified that someone would catch me. I’d never seen a six year-old knitting. I’d never seen anyone knitting in real life. But on cartoons, it was an activity for wise old women in rocking chairs. Like staying up late to watch horror movies or drinking beer—knitting was for adults.
The written instructions were far too complex for my Sally, Dick, and Jane reading abilities. But the step-by-step pictures were clear enough that I eventually managed to cast on a row of about ten stitches, and I was on my return sweep when I was discovered. My brother John was still holding the door open for Snoopy when I jumped from the water heater’s shadow to confess my unforgivable sin. John wasted no time running to tell. While I waited for Mom to swing past the heavy door and banish me to my room for inappropriate adult behavior, I managed to start a third row of stitches. Despite the impending doom I couldn’t make myself stop looping and pulling the yarn, twirling and clicking the wooden sticks. Already I could see that the book was right. I could make it myself.
John’s face burned red and his brows drew together when Mom merely raised her eyebrows and said, “You did that? From the pictures?” By the end of the week I had my own pair of emerald green knitting needles as long as my arm and sharp enough to put an eye out. They were at least as dangerous as our secret hatchet. I remember carrying them at arm’s length, pointed down so I wouldn’t impale myself if I tripped. Mom must have seriously overdone the “don’t run with scissors” speech. By the end of the month my stuffed animals were all wearing what looked to the casual observer like crooked orange scarves. Of course they were actually small strips that, when sewn together, would become a giant orange teepee. John was impatient with my progress but unwilling to help. He carved mini totem poles, read books, watched cartoons, and climbed trees. I knitted. My eyes turned red and bleary, my index fingers were dented to the shape of the needles, and I wasn’t sleeping anymore. Still, I knitted. Mom finally threatened to put my needles on top of the refrigerator if she caught me under the covers knitting by flashlight one more time. The next day I practiced knitting with my eyes closed, peeking only when I came to the end of a row. By the end of the week I was knitting under the covers in the pitch dark, slow but certain.
Determined, focused, stubborn, whatever you want to call it, I had this image in my head of a place John and I could build, and I would give up sleep, risk eye injury, and rub knitting calluses on my index fingers to make it.
As it turns out, a skinny child with knitting needles turns invisible in the shadowed corners of a room. So I spent a lot of time listening that fall. I was newly aware that my parents argued a lot. Dad was an atheist and Mom a devote Christian, a combination that eventually proved incompatible. Grandma Laura, Mom’s mama, had died that summer. Our family dynamics were morphing, settling in to fill the hole of her absence. Mom was sad in an aching sort of way that I could see even when her back was to me. Her head was lower, and her shoulders slumped in the typical stance of someone mourning. But it was more than that, more than just the heaviness of grief pushing down. As she canned tomatoes that autumn over the old gas stove, every lift of her arm, every step from stove to sink was lighter, as though she were growing transparent and would soon float away to wherever her mama had gone.
From the dining room table I kept watch on her through my clicking emerald needles, careful not to drop a stitch. The way the string looped, tied, and held everything together was soothing. I half believed that if I could tie enough knots, it would hold us all together. And when that belief failed, my belief turned to the solid space John and I were working to build, a space of our own, a place to hide.
Thirty years later, in the spring of 2007, I found myself in almost the same emotional state. I was still expecting all the twisting, pulling, and clicking I’d done in life to add up to something substantial, something solid. Mom, John, and I had long since moved to Arkansas, but Dad had never left Wisconsin. My kids and I were striving to turn our backs on the past and face the future with grace and bravery. As always, my family was the center of my life. And in ways both small and profound, we held each other up, held each other together, and held the rest of the world at bay when any of us where threatened by life’s really sharp teeth.
But it was another season that seemed unfairly littered with bad things. It was the first spring of my life without my grandma Doris, the only person who could have made it all okay with a firm hug, a soft kiss, and a softer cookie. Every Sunday afternoon, which had been our chat time, the reality of her absence came crashing in. The intensity of the sadness took me by surprise because even in my earliest memories, I was aware that Grandma would die. This morose fact was reinforced by picture books and after school specials addressing grandparent mortality. The surprise was that after a lifetime of preparation for the contingency, I was completely unprepared for the reality.
On one of these Sunday afternoons when the Bradford pear trees in my yard in Arkansas turned from sweetly white to electric green, my strong, always-healthy father called me from Wisconsin. “It’s going to fall below freezing again tonight,” he said casually, as though May frost was as common to me as to him. “The wind chill will be more like five degrees and the cat won’t leave my lap. Did I tell you I ordered new tomato seeds this year? And I guess they finally diagnosed that thing with my leg. Multiple Sclerosis. It’ll be a dry summer again. We just haven’t had enough snow for the past few years…”
My scalp went tingly and my vision tunneled. This news was completely unexpected. Not the new garden seeds, the weather, or the lazy cat, but the relabeling of what I’d believed was a pinched nerve in his right leg. Dad had been taking care of my ailing grandparents for ten years, his own health ignored. “Multiple sclerosis, and snow,” I said, not sure what the fumbling words meant. But when you talk to a Wisconsinite, every conversation has something to do with snow or the Packers, and football just didn’t seem to fit. We talked medications and management, but with no cure and few successful treatments, there wasn’t much to say. Even the words, “I love you, Dad,” had lost their bulky weight, bubbling up fragile and wispy across my tongue.
He was still a few years from retirement and one of the most brilliant and active people I’d ever known. I said these things over and over to friends and family, as though his wit, energy, and proximity to free time should have wrapped him in a blanket of immunity. The sudden, undeniable truth of Dad’s mortality crushed the air from my lungs, and even when I stood in my backyard with my arms lifted to the sky, the world no longer seemed big enough for me to inhale fully.
I was toppled by the reversal of who would be taking care of whom. Even though I was 800 miles away, I wanted to drop everything and run to him, slipping and sliding up his frozen sidewalk. But I had my own messy life to face in Arkansas. I had just gone through a divorce. No, truthfully, I had just gone through another divorce. So my self-esteem was demolished, my finances were in turmoil, and I had four kids to consider—two girls and two boys, three in school and one in diapers. My oldest daughter, seventeen year-old Hope, was suffering from a mysterious neurological condition that left her in constant pain. With a new, hereditary disease in our bloodline, she was immediately set up for brain scans to look for the tell-tale lesions that might indicate multiple sclerosis.
I was working a full time job that I didn’t like much, and a couple of part time jobs that I did. Work was about as busy and chaotic as I thought it could ever get. And then one of my coworkers, a gentle lady I’d worked with for seven years, died in a plane crash.
On the day of her funeral I received an email about the health effects of major stress. The email ended with a brief checkbox quiz of major stressors. After I checked all of the boxes and typed in additional categories that the quiz creators hadn’t even imagined, I laughed aloud at myself, giggling and snickering at the absurdity of so many things gone wrong all at once. Coworkers peeked in at me in singles and pairs, evaluating me from the doorway with furrowed brows and hand signals. I waved them away, unable to explain or to stop. Maniacal laughter wasn’t on the list of stress indicators, but most experts would agree it meets the qualifications.
Everyone around me seemed out of sync and liquid, floating crazily off the earth like helium filled balloon people tethered by one small toe. People were fluttering in the breeze just when I needed solid things to hold tight to. I felt as translucent and insubstantial as Mom had seemed all those years ago as she floated from sink to stove with vats of bubbling tomatoes.
This is when I noticed that solid things, things with deep root systems, were tugging at my attention. I doodled mammoth trees with gnarled roots, and squat, indestructible buildings with underground rooms. Marble, iron, cement, the heavier an object was, the more beautiful. At the library my selections shifted to architectural photo books and engineering diagrams. People say math is the universal language, or maybe just mathematicians say that. For me, building a structure became the universal truth, a sign of strength and longevity as old as mankind. Deep within me rang a primitive, desperate cry. I was the little girl again, twirling orange yarn into pieces of a teepee-haven. I needed to build something.
Maybe this was misguided energy, maybe that inner scream was intended to direct me toward rebuilding myself on the inside first, searching for emotional healing and all that. But with everything solid, including people, dreams, money, and beliefs, drifting away like vapor, I needed to build with things I could see and touch.
The kid’s were experiencing something similar. By that fall we were each in a state of anticipation, waiting for a major change that would bring us back together as a family. Hope was seventeen, Drew fifteen, Jada eleven, and Roman only two. The oldest three needed financial and emotional stability, but they also felt responsible for me. Over the past couple of years they had seen me physically and emotionally abused, which altered our child/parent role by shifting protective instincts onto their shoulders. They wanted to see me safe and happy. Two year-old Roman toddled along below these complicated stressors. He wanted such simple things, like daily cartoons, more time to jump off the bed and climb the mini blinds, and a fresh package of Oreo cookies every morning.
(This is a short sample of the draft to date. Email for more information.)
