Saturday, October 10, 2009

Houses & Homes, Pt 1

In a place and a time not too far from where we live, live people not too far from what we are. The people are not complicated, their labors are not in vain. They eat, drink, and find satisfaction in their work. For these simple folk, man's greatest achievement is the construction of a home; a domicile for him and his. This is the story of one young man in that place.

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He'd always loved his parents' house. It was older than he was and had all the eccentricities that come along with such age. It was worn down to comfort by life and years. When something broke, his mom and dad worked hard to fix it again. It was these aspects that appealed to him; the house was not perfect, not elegant by most means, but it was solid, beautiful, and warm. He loved his house.

But it was not his house.

When the time came, as it does in the life of every young man, he packed up his belongings, slung them across his back, kissed his mother good-bye, and walked out the front door to make his own way in the world and, one day, to build his own home. In addition to the supplies necessary for survival, he carried with him tools: shovel, axe, lighter, rope, saw, hammer. These he would want eventually, when he found just the right plot of land, but they were not the most important tools he carried with him.

In his hands, he had the skills he had acquired over his lifetime, some more useful than others. With these skills, he made his way – foraging, bartering, working, doing whatever he needed to do to continue on his journey. His parents were intelligent, hard-working folk and they had done their best to ensure that he had been given every skill he would need to survive on the road. He possessed a quick, nimble mind, a clever eye, and an easy, sociable nature. No feat seemed beyond his reach.

I tell you this not merely to inform you about this young man's nature, but also as a contrast to the second important tool that he carried with him. In his mind, as most people do, he held a blueprint of the house that he would one day build and a list of all the materials he would want to use in the construction. Some of the ideas he'd gotten from his parents' house, some, from his friends. A few of the concepts were original ideas, never before used in a house of which he knew. Never satisfied with the staples, we was consistently scrapping certain materials in favor of different, less common ones. It was this never-ending search for the perfect construction that drove him, both forward and slightly mad.

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There are always a lot of people on the road, going all sorts of places in all manners of conveyances. Many of his friends traveled with him for a long time, making discoveries, experiencing hardships, laughing. A few quickly found their plots and settled down to build. He visited as often as he could, offered his help where desired. Eventually, they all parted ways, needing to find their own separate paths.

He kept up communications with a few of them, penning long letters every few months. Once a year, they gathered again in the old glade, trading stories and ideas in the glow of embers and starlight, but every year, fewer returned.

Loneliness began to color his frustration. Everyone around him seemed to have found their ideal settings and had settled down, but he knew that their decisions were not his own and that he could never be happy with their lives. He trudged on.

One day, while picking up some supplies in town, he met a girl his own age who was also unsatisfied with the choices of her friends and family. She was tiny and delicate, all wide eyes and dainty hands. Her small arms would never be able to swing a hammer precisely, let alone fell a tree and cut it into planks; he wondered how she would build her house. He wondered about his own.

He introduced himself and they got to talking, about their travels, their ideas, what they were looking for in life. They had many similar propensities and took to each other quickly. Over the next few weeks, they saw each other often on the road. His path and her's seemed to cross more and more regularly and he usually helped her strike camp at night; her shelters were flimsy, barely keeping out the rain, and she detested making fires. He was amazed at the strength of will she possessed to make it this far, in spite of what appeared to be a complete lack of the necessary skills.

The months passed, the seasons changed, and they grew to rely on each other. Winter had come. The snows blowing in fast and they hunkered down, together, to wait for the thaw.

Abandoning their temporary shelters, he dug a foundation and put up four walls of sod blocks, topping it off with a roof of oak branches and bark. It was simple and small, but it kept the wind out at night. During the thin air of the early morning, he would hunt, bringing back fresh meat as often as he could. The bulk of the daylight hours were spent goofing off, playing in the cold white and chatting about what they could do once the thaw came. When the sun went down and the wind began to howl, they would huddle together in their blankets and he would tell her stories to drown out her concerns.

Slowly, inexorably, the days lengthened. The snow had lost its annual appeal and the two found themselves with more and more time on their hands. The animals were returning and awakening and food was plentiful; he was even able to find green things for her to eat to satisfy her less-than-carnivorous appetite. Cramped, bored, and increasingly irritable, they began to expand their tiny hut.

One dull morning, she awoke to the rhythmic sound of axe swings, like a raw heartbeat in the gauzy winter sunshine. All that day – and most of that week – he spent felling trees and hewing them into planks which she then sanded and planed. They had no nails, so he worked methodically, cutting notches into each board and fitting them together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Progress was slow and frustrating. Once started, he attacked the project with a sort of mania, driven to finish it by a deep, intrinsic need to create something out of nothing. She, in comparison, was content to help where she could, not caring about the form of the structure, but merely the function and, as a consequence, couldn't see his concept and often missed a crucial step, forcing him to scrap a day's labor and start over.

The spring thaw found them living in a small house, sleeping in a real bed, cooking in a dedicated kitchen, and storing their leftovers in a dirty – yet tidy – cellar. Their next project was a garden, for which she picked out the items to be planted and he tilled the earth. For a while, they loved their little house and modest existence. The warm sun was a balm for the cabin fever caused by the long months spent in the sod hut, the food from their little garden giving them the simple joy of the fruits of their labors.

Spring pressed on and both occupants of the little house found their discontent growing proportionally with the length of each day. The garden wasn't big enough for her. The house was only one story. He was finding it to be stifling and too warm during the hotter parts of the day. By mid-summer, she demanded that he build a proper house. He didn't take much convincing.

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