v. construction

We did not always live at the farm house. This was not an ancestral property handed down generation after generation. We were the first of our clan to take root here, to till and sew the earth, to claim this patch of wilderness as our own.
I remember a time before we lived on the farm. Our small bungalow was a stone’s throw away from the farmland and yet so very different. The bungalow was a place of sturdy walls and solid fences, of a definite, certain border between home and wilderness.

When we first came to the farm it was uninhabitable.

It came to us shaped like a mad thing, with staircases missing where they should be, and built where they led to nothing. It was beautiful in places, destroyed in others.

It had good bones, though, my parents insisted, and we lived in a trailer while they spent months carefully stripping it down to them. My mother would place us all in the playpen I had long since outgrown, instructing me to keep watch of my sisters as they worked, and the netting of the sides seemed less a thing to hold us in than an attempt to keep everything else out.
There was so much to keep out. After so many years abandoned, the place had been wholly overtaken by any creature clever enough to find its way in. There were raccoons in the attic and mice all around and too many cobwebs to count, some seeming to be the only thing keeping areas together.

And the bats. I will never forget the sight of it, of hundreds of shrieking bats flying out of the place where my mother had just removed some old siding, as she screamed and screamed and screamed.

There was no yard to speak of, every inch of it overtaken by wilderness that had to be fought back, mowed down, cut away. Fences constructed brand new borders as barriers between old growth and our new, occupied land.

Even once we had moved in fully there were things about the house we did not understand. After a few years of living there, my father, certain that the dimensions of the house did not match the layout of the interior, put a hole through the wall a discovered a small, closed off room.

He did not let us look through the hole.

Still, he perused the project, opening walls and rebuilding anew until its strange angles became the familiar scene of our playroom, and once we grew too old to comfortably share space, the bedroom of my sister, who claimed it as her own. I never understood how she slept there.

I remember the first few sleepless nights in the farm house, when it had finally been deemed inhabitable. With its fresh paint and new floors it hardly seemed to be the same place we had first seen, the day our parents declared it would be ours.
Still, when night came, you could hear the old house under the shape of its new ornamentation. The shudders and creaks as it moved around us, the cry of wind shifting through places that reconstruction could not uncover.

We were certain it was haunted then. We cried as our mother put us to bed, sure if we closed our eyes whatever wandered the house would come and get us. After many restless nights my mother performed a ritual, casting a mixture made according to our grandmother about the corners of the room as she hummed something in Dutch.

It helped us sleep easier, for a time.

It did nothing to stop the house though. After all, you cannot exorcise ghosts when there were none to begin with. What there was instead, was the house.

It had been a school house, once. A small, one-room place. This is what we came to call the Log Room. The center of the house, it was beautiful old wood, sturdy and solid in a way that seemed hyper-real. Everything else was additions, made over years and years as the place transitioned from a school to a home and various families added or removed to it according to their needs.

The longer we lived there, the more we became accustomed to its funny habits. The way certain places were sure to trip you up if you were not careful. The way you should ignore the cracks in the floorboards, never looking through them and down. The way that too much time in the attic or basement was unwise. The way that certain spaces seemed to reshape themselves in the dark.

We slept with a nightlight far longer than other children.

Still, there was nothing too sinister about the place. As we settled, it settled with us. The swift rebuilding of our initial occupation slowed, becoming small repair projects rather than sudden upheavals. The house sheltered us through seasons and storms. So if it sometimes frightened friends over for sleepovers, this was easily ignored. If I sometimes found myself standing silent in the Log Room with no idea why, this was certainly just forgetfulness. If is sometimes seemed that the rest of the house had changed about this room, if the patter of feet above did not seem to belong to my sisters, if the voices in the kitchen were not ones I recognized, then it was a simple matter to shut my eyes until the world righted itself again. Until I could walk out of that room and into the right home.

Sometimes, I will glance at the place where there was once a staircase leading to nowhere, and wonder if the house remembers all the shapes it has taken, the people it has housed. I will try not to wonder for too long. This house has been reshaped by my family, and by families before mine for centuries.  The only constant is construction. It is no wonder this change could do something to a place.

A new family lives there now. I am sure they will make their own changes, build and rebuild as we have all done before them.
I am sure the house will not care. Whatever happens to its surface is nothing to the thing that it is.

​As my mother said, it has good bones.