Like a Rolling Stedge

For many reasons, this new set of steps up the block from me makes me happy. It's made of dry-laid stone. First off, that makes me happy because it's beautiful. It calls to mind the old farm walls common in the Hudson Valley, the work of contemporary sculptors such as Andy Goldsworthy, and the contribution to my own home of its most famous former owner, quarry magnate Hewitt Boyce, who generously paved a path of bluestone slabs to our front porch steps.

Dry-laid stone is more than pleasing to the eye, though. It's practical, long-lived, and easy on the environment. This is from the web site of an organization called the Dry Stone Conservancy:

Dry stone has been a successful building technique throughout the ages because of its unique range of benefits. It provides good employment for craftsmen [sic] without working capital for heavy equipment. Masons need a minimum of tools to erect structures that are remarkably durable; yet, if damaged, are easily repaired. They resist fire, water, and insects. If correctly designed, they are earthquake resistant. The work does not deplete natural resources, and aesthetically compliments and enhances the landscape.

Dry stone structures have many advantages over mortared walls. Walls without mortar rely on the skill of the craftsmen [sic] and the forces of gravity and frictional resistance. They have a slight flexibility that allows them to conform to foundation settlement without damage. Because the sides slope slightly inward, ground movement locks the structure more tightly together.Importantly, a stiff concrete footing is not needed, saving labor and material expense.

Mortared walls have a shorter life span than drystone walls because frozen rain and snow get trapped in mortared seams and push the joints apart, whereas a correctly-built drystone wall drains naturally without damage. Accidents to mortared walls tend to break out large sections, making damage-repairs costly. Mortared walls also cost more to repair because mortared rock is not easily recyclable, requiring additional new material.

We have a brick-and-mortar planter in our backyard that we never quite got around to replacing with dry-laid stone. The ice and rain heave and erode the thing, so it spews bricks, most of them hanging on to mortar in a useless, asymmetrical way, so I take the point about not being able to recycle these bricks so easily. Plus, they don't look as nice as stone, and don't blend as well with ferns and ivy. So the practicality is my second reason for loving to walk by that new set of steps on my block.

The third reason comes from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, et al. The pattern is "Stair Seats," and refers to the human need to congregate and observe passersby from steps. One thing I love about Kingston is its roomy wraparound porches, but even homes without them such as this one can have inviting stairs to sit on, and, during the cool evenings we often experience here in the Gateway to the Catskills, they will retain the heat of the sun and become thermally advantageous sit-upons.

The fourth reason involves an appeal to other senses made by the craftsperson's sign that reads "Stone Stedge." I can't pass that sign without saying "stedge" out loud, then continuing to recite rhyming words, many of them referencing things found in the above picture: edge, ledge, hedge, sledge, dredge, fledge, wedge, sedge, you get the idea—all solid, fun-to-say words with rich sensory associations.

So what is a stedge? I could call and ask the talented masons at Stone Stedge, but I think I prefer to speculate.

Could be somebody's last name.

Or it could be a house joke, based on this meaning found at UrbanDictionary.com:

Used as a substitution for a word in a commonly known phrase, so therefore it does not obscure the nuance of the original phrase. Its sole purpose is to inspire and encourage silliness.
To stedge or not to stedge, that is the question.
If it weren’t for bad stedge I’d have no stedge at all.
If you've seen one stedge, you've seen 'em all.
Inquiring minds need to stedge.


How does it feel
How does it feel
To have a hard, soft edge
To move with ice's wedge
To be a flexible ledge
Like a rolling stedge?

Our MLS Listing

The listing for our house.

OPEN HOUSE
August 2, 2009, 1 pm - 3 pm

While I'm doing some selling, I want to re-post some links about Kingston in a little piece I wrote up for Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn about our house:




Business Week named Kingston One of the top ten Best Places for Artists in America, 2007. The New York Times recently touted Kingston's real estate deals for weekenders: "The New Country Squires", The New York Times, July 2,2009. Those with elementary-age children might be interested to know that the public school two blocks from this house recently adopted a Montessori approach to teaching that just got a green light for more funding and rave reviews from parents. The annual Artists' Soapbox Derby, coming up in August, is a must. The town is going nuts with gardening and other green initiatives. And one of the best things about Kingston is the ease with which you can bop to neighboring towns (Woodstock, Rhinebeck, Bard College, Red Hook, High Falls, Stone Ridge, Rosendale, New Paltz), ski resorts, and boat-launch spots.

The Last Paint Project

In the doorway to the kitchen, they have stood barefoot, Sharpie in one hand, measuring tape in the other, one eye on the calendar, the other on the elusive three-, then four-foot mark. (Too briefly, they needed help.) Sometimes unrecorded months passed, then for a few weeks they would measure and chart each other every day, argumentatively, giddily, documenting a spurt of growth or a period of acute impatience.

Remain fixed as a camera and witness the gradual: morning glories blink, the sun rolls behind the Catskills, water replenishes the fussy downstairs toilet tank. Red light!—if you could freeze, if you didn't have to feed and clothe, romp and read, you would observe the invisible increment, catch the tooth in the act of breaking through the gum. Instead of clipping back their nails, you could hold their hands in the evening under a pool of lamp light and behold the waxing of ten moons, quick as an eclipse, sudden, the way tiny shadows lengthen when they dart out to the yard of late afternoon.

Deep Energy Retrofit

I've been googling "deep energy retrofit" and reading about homes renovated from the outside by having their siding ripped off, their walls built out several inches with insulation, then new siding put on.

It's the kind of thing that should be done to big old Victorians like ours, although it'll cost you. I particularly like this piece about how historic preservation and energy retrofitting needn't be at odds. We owners of our world's housing stock need some whopping rebates, breaks, and grants to bring existing buildings into line with green values, and training programs for builders in deep energy retrofitting are probably necessary.

Of course, new homes can be built to be superinsulated, like the ones in Darmstadt, Germany that are so tight they run on the body heat of their inhabitants. I have the dream of building a home from scratch just like anybody, but I still think the 'reduce, reuse, recycle' rule makes as much if not more sense when considering home ownership as it does when deciding whether to buy rice in a plastic bottle or bring a bag from home and get it from the bulk bin.

I haven't stopped thinking about the "faux Hispano-Moorish Society for Creative Anachronism" house. I have a tremendous urge to buy it, rip off the plastic shakes, lay on the foam bigtime, re-do the roof with good rain catchment, stick some solar panels up there or in the yard, and knock bigger windows out of the south side. Re-side in cedar and you've got a great-looking house steps away from a beautiful stretch of creek for kayaking. (I didn't mention over a thousand square feet of shag carpeting and acoustic tile ceiling that have to go, too, but for the right person it's a workout plan: ripping out carpet is probably what, 50 calories a square foot?)

After the last few months, I have to admit I'm tired of endless making nicey-nice. I wouldn't mind finding a place I could move into and just live for a while.

Fixations

Knowing our MLS listing would go up today, I left the paint brush alone and set my mind on cleaning, planning to vacuum, dust, and mop, room by room. But before getting through all that I became obsessed with the rigorous enterprise of scrubbing creosote off the inside of the glass fireplace doors. I gave myself a good cardiac workout returning them to transparency and pondered times spent in front of that fireplace—hanging out with friends on Christmas day, reading books on the little couch we pulled to face the blaze; Power Day Off evenings lit by firelight and, sometimes, the oil lamp from my great grandparents' farm. I don't know whether it was the exertions of steel wool or memory that sent me upstairs after that for an hour's deep sleep.

When we first moved to our house, we sent out a postcard with a picture of us sitting on the front porch, and this quotation from The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard:

And after we are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorial things are. We live fixations, fixations of happiness.



My husband and I started talking seriously about selling about a year ago, and the pendulum swing from yes to no has slowed, but not yet ceased. I can only imagine the pain of people who've gone through foreclosure, the rugs literally pulled out from under them, how it must feel to flee and leave one's possessions, or have strangers come and take things away.

I would like to say I've gotten used to the idea of leaving, but I haven't.
Maybe I need a clearer idea of where we're headed. For a place to replace this one in our hearts it must be just as magical. I hope the next owner will feel as strongly as we did about making the house greener and more energy efficient while preserving its history.

Here's a whimsical sale blurb I wrote for Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn (hoping another Brooklynite might move up here and take over!):

Amenities: Cozy sun room with hearth, overlooking peach tree. Rainbow fairy staircase realm, favorable flow from room to room, wall-gliding sunlight panels, forehead-cooling marble mantelpieces. AAA hide-and-seek rating. Squirrel antic observation corner. Breakfast with birds. Airy mansard attic fit for future majestic master bedroom or eccentric artist's playground or use your imagination. Seat 16 for Thanksgiving. Backyard foraging for raspberries in summer.

I wish all real estate listings could be written that way, knowing that what is really bought and sold, paradoxically, are intangibles that can never be bought and sold—memory, childhood, yesterday.

All Over the Place

With our house days from going on the market, my husband and I decided to look at a 'property' today, in hopes of stirring up some affection for the task of making another home.

I knew the place was a long shot, but under what my friend/realtor's husband called the "faux Hispano-Moorish décor"—picture three-quarter-sized suits of armor, knives and pistols, glass decanters, nonfunctional weldware—were, I hoped, good bones. I knew the foundation was concrete block (wishful thinking: thermal mass!), there were a couple of interesting masonry fireplaces and potentially good light, and a peaceful siting across the road from a creek that reminds me of my childhood summer home. The 70s makeover of a 50s structure, with its wall-to-wall shag, iron-and-colored-glass chain lamp, and glitter stucco, all brought back my youth. I thought of Nixon resigning, of gas siphoning and the energy crisis, and of the Jackson 5 cartoon show.

After an hour of knocking on cheap paneling, poking at acoustic ceiling to see what lay beneath, sniffing for mold, and mentally reconfiguring the layout, I realized that the first 100K would solely address aesthetic issues. That would leave little dough for potential structural issues (flat roof, a leak at the foundation, the unknown?) and sustainability investments (geothermal, solar, rain catchment...all the stuff we didn't get to in our present house but feel is essential next time out). Photo above right: here I discover that what I thought was cedar shake with an unfortunate coat of white paint is actually a plastic facsimile thereof.

I also felt I was kind of in Lalaland even to consider home ownership and all its uncertainties. It was a big relief to come home to the solid plaster walls and massive beams in this admittedly oversized but exquisitely crafted house. At the moment, I can't bear to think about leaving. The endless thought experiments ennervate me.

Through the day I exchanged emails with a friend who is a professor. I mentioned the difficulty of inhabiting these different scenarios, and he corrected me, pointing out that "inhabit" is an interesting word that inappropriately conjures images of stability. He wrote:

what i see in me and other people right now, is a struggle to learn the new rules of the game. it's more fluctuating in disbelief between positions and states of mind rather than inhabiting these places. in some cases, people are quite desperate and very angry as they have lost jobs and about to lose their homes. my students this past 2 semesters were all over the place, unable to concentrate or think properly.

After we looked at the house we went to our friends'/realtor's cabin a dozen lots up the road and sat on their porch overlooking the creek. We decided that the most suitable role for the building we had just carefully considered, and rejected, would be as headquarters for the Society for Creative Anachronism, and maybe not just because of the heraldry paraphernalia. The sense of chronological misplacement on entering rooms reminiscent of the decade when I was growing up, distracted by worries about an economy compared to, but less gentler and more absurdly abstract than, the Depression of my parents' childhood, with the miniature medieval gewgaws all about, was soulspinning.

We are not among the desperate, and we know it's happenstance that put us in good digs. I do feel angry though—most of all on behalf of the above-mentioned students or people who have been foreclosed on rather than helped to stay in their homes, or those taxed out of houses on one hand while being told they can't have renters on the other. What good is an increasing vacancy rate to anyone?

What It's Like to Sell a House: A Study in Tropes

There is no getting around how incredibly anxiety-provoking it is to sell a house, but I want to focus for the moment on the exhaustion brought on by the trying
on of possibilities.

The uncertainty of what next must be resolved somehow, and you do it, if you're like me, by imagining and attaching to different scenarios, one every 24 hours.

1. There's a Place for Us: It's like having a calling...there's a town, city, mountain out there with your name on it, with all the amenities you need. It leads you to websites like findyourspot.com or Who's Your City?, You take endless surveys, read 'best places' books and sites, interview friends in farflung quarters. You attach to Elsewhere. You become Place: 'I'm a mid-sized city;' 'No sales tax and a running trail circling a lake, that's me,' 'Give me a house by a creek so I can be Staycationland,' 'Walkable town with rail trail and a bus to a major metropolis will do me dandy.'

2. Open Road: Refurbish an Airstream with some solar panels, put your stuff in a Pod, and hit the road. Live small for a while (despite the crappy gas mileage, you'll likely reduce your carbon footprint, or even better, if you're DIY enough, you'll go biodiesel), give the kids an alternative tour of the U.S., forget what it's like to pay an electric bill or mow. Visit all those Facebook friends—f2f! Endless reading of blogs that link from Roadschooling.

3. Back Where You Came From: Why did we move to this house, anyway? Weren't things okay before? Can we go back? Wasn't that where we belonged? The roots myth pretends to be stable and definite, but soon reveals itself otherwise as each of your various roots presents itself as the authentic, deepest delving, original tendril.

4. Grow Where You're Planted: Let's just find a smaller version of this house, one we can afford, one we can retrofit green, let's set out on foot and check everything for sale we can find, let's not disrupt our life, our cat's routines, our friendships, our systems...let's not relive the stress to be found in Square One.

What settles over the whole of this cycling, or beneath it, as an undertow, is a kind of ennui. Normal enthusiasms, necessarily shelved for the moment, give intimations of having disappeared completely. The lists and dreamy conversations that led us to leave the city and make a new life, peremptorily cut short, it seems, are more scattered now than they were then. My husband and I find ourselves skittering along too many hypothetical paths. Or maybe the right image is of two actors madly changing costumes in a dressing room, trying to prepare to go on stage for any and all plays (some of them apocalyptic). The word 'trope,' related to the idea of turning, feels apt. We are turning, turning, turning, and right now, I feel dizzy.