As Safe As Houses

This house warps and melts like a 

wedding cake in fragrant summer,

each molded corner bleeding into 

the door-frames.

All the furniture is hemmhorraging

its stuffing, regretful and dolorous.

We could peel strips of the faded hardwood

away with our fingertips,

grasping furtively some sense

of decayed mystery beneath the boards,

where the earth meets the hearth.

The fireplace is still choked with coal dust,

and there's pale squares

where paintings once hung

in lost days of antiquity. 

Even the windows,

with their burden of busy insects and

swiftly-rusting screens,

are a reference point in glass.

Washing Dishes In The Vast Night

Our house here in Burlington is a continuing revelation to me, a simple wonder slowly unraveling with the passing seasons. The rambling, strange design of this 1910 folly offers unending surprises and tiny, mysterious secrets to pry open. We moved here for the space; Denny wanted a larger kitchen than we had in Hillsborough, and I wanted room for recording in a more atmospheric setting, something imbued with cobwebs and a little dusty age. I had known the area from past visits (good friends attended college nearby), but the house was what drew me in, a towering old relic bound with aging gray siding and burgundy shutters, wrapped with an endless porch and skirted by an expansive, sprawling yard.

There's much to love about our large but modest home. Details leap into focus for me even as I type this post. The tarnished squares of faded white where pictures once hung on the walls, the elegant curve the staircase takes in its final steps descending into the darkness of the foyer, are all frequent reminders of the grace in past generations of residential architecture. Upstairs, the original hardwood floor is burnished and scarred, and downstairs, beautifully-carved designs in the door-frames and moldings remain, geometric shapes in white. The rooms are populated with brightly-reflecting French doors and a series of crumbling brick fireplaces, and in the yard stand three magnificent oaks withering with age.

The house is in a working-class neighborhood in Burlington, and it's admittedly not in anything but livable shape. Affordability was as much a factor as space. But where some would merely scoff at the peeling paint of the back stairs or the cracking, splintered porch-boards out front, or would roll their alarmed eyes at the corroded bathtub or the sloped warping linoleum of the kitchen floor, I find the same tarnished beauty I see in all of Burlington. This decayed manse suits me well, at least for now, until we inevitably flee to the solitude of the woods again someday, having tired of 'city' life downtown. For now, we've made this place our own, a rickety battlement against the rising tide of sprawl around the state. By clinging to our history and tenderly caring for it, we preserve it it alive and whole. 

"Ever since I have been so involved

In loving the feeling of keeping a small house warm and clean,

I'm not always aware that there are stars above stars

Just above that ceiling.

Or that the rain gushing throws the trash into the street,

Or that the wind in dark parking lots, at this moment,

Holds a leaf to the fence.

I sort of remember the world, but my small house is glowing.

A car playing music drives past the window

While I'm washing dishes in the vast night."

                                              -Mount Eerie, "Small House"

We Dream In Our Waking Moments, And Walk In Our Sleep

Lately I've been re-reading 'The Scarlet Letter', that hated bane of so many teenaged American existences, for the first time in about a decade. As always, Hawthorne's work manages to both haunt and intrigue in equal measure. Imminently drier than my favorite works of old Nathaniel, 'The Scarlet Letter' still incandescently smolders with the delirium of its prose, a heady brew of paranoia, shameful secrets, and fear.

It's the terror that most lingers in my continuing fascination with the early settlers of Massachusetts. One can imagine how foreboding such a land must have seemed to them, those severe British cultists in their pitch-black clothes and dour expressions. The America of the age was an endless carpet of dark, unknowable forests and steeply climbing hillsides. As man is known to do, the Puritans set at once to creating their own demons when confronted with the void. Man must explain, to put into a frame of reference, what cannot be understood. There, balanced on an edge of this new, depthless oblivion, setting foot into a world utterly unknown, they populated those woods with demons and witches. It was either a precarious attempt to better understand their mysteries, or a realization that the truth of all that unknown land was much darker, indeed. They were so far from home, and behind their backs teemed a multitude of open-ended questions.

In such tense, unusual situations, men tend to turn on each other. Suspicion, conspiracy, and hidden lives are cast like shadows behind the chalk-white facade of every early settler. In 'The Scarlet Letter', every finger that points in Hester Prynne's direction is stained with the blood of its own sin. Only Hester's quarantine allows her to see this clearly, as one accursed, excluded. Freed from the bindings of a severely unhealthy repression, she sees behind the veil. America is a loss of innocence, a confrontation with the animal nature of our environs. The Puritans' growing pains were a part of becoming the first Americans. Their behaviors and reactions would shape what that word would later mean. We've all seen how such legacies resonate through the decades towards today.

I grew up shaded by dark and eerie hills in the western half of Massachusetts, but it's somehow still North Carolina that is conjured by re-reading these florid colonial works. Our state's first settlers disappeared without any trace, and it's as if they're still lingering here between the hazy pines, hovering aloft in the tall grasses of the fields. Hundreds of vanished families like ghosts drifting about in whispers, shadowing every step. This state is shrouded in its past in a way so unique, so peculiar, that I haven't yet seen its double elsewhere. For every Costco, every new lakeside McMansion development, every strip of blank-faced office buildings or desolate fast-food parking lots, you're still just moments away from a bottomless frontier. Just last week, ten minutes from home, Denny and I camped alone at Shallow Ford entirely surrounded by the abyss. Hundreds of years and nothing has changed. America is still a mystery, a void beyond a void, a thin fabric behind a carefully-constructed surface. America is still just a murky sea of trees and hills, masking spirits and devils and wretches casting spells much as it did in the early days. We've managed to put a mask on it, but we're all still huddled close against the campfire light, jumping nervously at every rustling noise deep within the forest.