Dreamin' My Dreams

Don't we all have that childhood dream? That singular dream that begins to take shape the moment we first start grasping who we are. What color we like best, what type of clothing we like to wear, what type of music we like, what interests us, what inspires us...etc.

It's a dream that embodies our maturity over the years. For example, say you like horses. When you're just a little girl, or boy, you might beg your parents for the latest American Girl horse tantalizing displayed just out of reach behind a pane of store front glass. When you're a bit older, say elementary school, you might pine for a pony...then on to junior high and eventually high school where it's 4-H, riding lessons, showing, leasing, buying, more showing, more horses. And on and on and on! Do you see where I'm trying to go with this? Your dream could either start off very simple and focused, like the little girl looking at the American Girl horse with yearning eyes...and eventually morph into a dream of owning a breeding or horse rescue farm. Or it could be a huge dream from the beginning, with a little kid's mind stretching as far as his imagination can go, intrigued by endless possibilities, tantalized by the future and what it holds.

Whatever your personal dream is, in this week's blog post I'm here to tell you about mine. Granted, it's always been one of my dreams to own a horse, a more dominant goal - or dream - in my life is to someday buy an old house that needs fixing up and renovate it while I'm living in it. There's something about living in a dilapidated, tired old home and bringing it back to life that inspires me in so many ways.

In my last blog post I talked about the horse rescue farm, Sunrise Horse Farm, that I volunteer at in Reedsville. On the side of the gravel driveway leading to the farm there's an old, paint-stripped, hollowed out house that's been abandoned for twenty years or more. The first time I went out to her farm I noticed it immediately, conspicuously blending in with the labyrinth of trees and fallen branches. Its tall, narrow window frames looked out at me with empty, black eyes and its frame leaned to the left, as if it were contemplating giving in to slumber which as pulled at its every rotted beam since nature took its toll.

Perhaps from how I described the abandoned house you already can guess why it is my dream to own an old house that needs restoring! If that wasn't proof enough, take my obsession with an indispensable site called oldhouses.com in which realtor's can post listings of old houses for sale to potential buyers specifically looking for them. The listings are open to the general public also, and you can sign up to receive new listings added to the website to be delivered to your email inbox, which of course I do! There are so many beautiful houses on the site, which you can keep in a feature called a scrapbook. In my own scrapbook are mainly Victorian style homes and early style Colonial's, with a few Dutch Colonial's and Antebellum's thrown into the mix.

While perusing the archived listings on the site, which are houses that have sold but still remain on the site for viewing pleasure, I stumbled across a Victorian home labeled old house story. That usually means that whoever posted the listing has a blog or story attached to it, how they renovated it, what it means to them...etc. After clicking on one such blog it led me to another one, which I immediately became engrossed with. It revolved around a couple of unknown age who had bought a late 1800's Victorian farmhouse and were restoring it while living in it. Not only that...they were blogging about it!

Instantly, while reading nearly every blog post, I thought that they were living my dream. Time and time again I've defiantly told my Mom that an old house is significantly more interesting than a new house. Even if you inject character and individuality into a new home, it is still blatantly lacking that inimitable character and history that an old home has. Each old home as a story to tell of all the years it's seen, and all the people which have passed through its rooms and doorways. It's a story that can only be acquired over centuries of existence and change. A story that can't be duplicated in newer homes, no matter how precise you try to replicate it. Again, like I've told my Mom many times before, I'd take the sagging floors, crumbling, under insulated plaster walls, outdated electricity, drafty rooms and windows, peeling painted siding, high heating costs and everything in between any day in favor of a new, perfectly functioning new home. I wouldn't want my home to be perfect anyway. Sticking doors, sagging floors and drafty windows are all part of its story, its character, things that make the house almost like an individual and coincidentally they're the same things that so palpably attract me to historic homes in the first place.

Adding on to any older home's fixer-up persona, so to speak, like I said before I've always found dilapidated, old homes intensely appealing. Take one of my poems I wrote recently and posted on my blog entitled Memoir of an Old House, in which a ramshackle, neglected old house finds solitude and common ground with its aging owner who is a forgotten man of divorce with nothing but the house for company. Whenever I write about houses I always receive strong mental images in my mind, and then work my hardest to transfer as much detail of each image onto paper. There's just something about houses in general, but especially old houses obviously, that inspire deeply and endlessly in my writing.

Once again, I digress, but getting back on track! Referring back to my passion for dilapidated - and also abandoned - houses - another one of my favorite magazines, unsurprisingly, is This Old House. Albeit I enjoy looking at the pictures and reading the articles my favorite section of the magazine is the one on the very last page entitled Save This Old House. Within this section readers submit a picture and story of an old house in danger of demolition, in desperate need of repairs or just in need of a loving touch. These are the houses that, to throw a trite phrase out there, pull at my heart strings. It also angers me when I read a story about a beautiful house in danger of being razed in favor of mundane condos or a parking lot. I won't get too much into that topic because I know I'll end up going on a rant!

To further explain how much I love dilapidated homes, take a short story I've been tossing around in my mind like a piece of sweet tasting candy rolling on my tongue. It's entitled The Healing House and was inspired by a certain late 1800's Victorian home I discovered within the Save This Old House section of the afore mentioned magazine a couple months ago. In one my former blog posts I'm sure I described how after viewing a singular picture of a historic home I begin weaving a story around and behind it, until a new short story is born and revolves around a house! Like the all the rest of them do. :)

In The Healing House there are two characters, who are sisters, Georgina (22) and Gwenyvere (16). Their parents, Dawson and Gillian Harding, were to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in Sweden for half a month, skiing, touring and a slew of other things. A month went by and still Mr. and Mrs. Harding hadn't returned. Georgina - who is the story's main character - called police from their comfortable, newly built home in New York's countryside and the search began. It wasn't long before the Harding's were labeled as missing persons, and an amber alert went out everywhere.

I won't bother you with too many details, but eventually Georgina and Gwenyvere give up the search and split up their parent's belongings, putting the four-bedroom house for sale. A lawyer plans to place them both with relatives but one thing Georgina and Gwenyvere both agree on is that they don't want to become a burden to any of them, especially seeing as their mother only had one sister and their father only had two brothers who lived in the Alaskan wilderness. Georgina barters with the lawyer, searching for a second solution. It's then that the lawyer discovers one of Mr. Harding's longest kept secrets. A secret, in fact, that he was planning to reveal to his family shortly after returning from Sweden. It seems that from his few and far flung descendants Dawson Harding had inherited a one and a half story Victorian Queen Anne home in the obscure, small town of Union Springs, Alabama.

Georgina of course, before asking for more information on this sudden and puzzling find, jumps at the chance to save the dilapidated home which had been left abandoned for five years, and drags Gwenyvere from their plush New York home to a rambling, drafty, paint-stripped Victorian home foreign to them in every sense of the word. Except for the undiscovered memories that lay hidden within its walls, within its rooms, and within its very core. Memories that will force them both back to the thought of their parents, whom they had both tried to distance themselves from because of the numbing pain. Georgina had given up hope along with the lawyers, excepting the facts as a sign to move on while Gwenyvere stubbornly stood her ground, silently wishing they would keep searching, they must still be alive.

Obviously there is major tension between the sisters after the move, but in all honesty, they never got along in the first place. Both of them are so completely different. Those differences are only amplified after the search was ended for their parents. I entitled this short story The Healing House because over time, while both of them restore the house and discover hidden, albeit painful memories to relive of their parents, wading through such dark waters will in turn heal them, both their personal scars and those ripped between them. The house will become both a connection to the past and a connection between each other, as well a connection to a new future. A future in which they no longer push the memories of their parents into a dark, shadow laden corner but keep them close to their heart, remembering what was, and how a series of unspeakably painful events brought them to an unassuming house which silently did so much for them.

I'll admit, though you probably guessed already I've never been one for brevity, but hopefully I didn't ramble on too long about one of my recent short story ventures. But I'm excited about it!

Old houses are a major part of why I write, if not one of the main reasons, and they will continue to inspire me. Both in my writing, and my own life. Like I mentioned way in the beginning of this blog post, I someday wish to own a dilapidated old home not unlike the one I described in The Healing House and live in it while I fix it up. Whether I'll sell it after I'm done restoring or simply choose to stay permanently is up for discussion! Knowing me, I'd become irrevocably attached with every single house I restored. It can't be helped though right?