Edward Hopper: Night in the Park, etching (1921)
"… this dance should properly continue into an eminently unforeseeable future."

When The Muse and I first stepped into this house, it was as spare and bare as a newborn baby, a blank canvas of a place devoid of distinguishing character. After weeks and weeks of stepping into places, some also blank canvasses and others over-crowded with leftover stories and others' possessions, this house seemed a welcome respite. It held nothing but potential then, other than its native dimensions, and even those seemed alien since we'd never lived in a house this new, for it was fewer than twenty years old. Our home place was nearly a hundred and ten by then, and we carried that certain distain for more modern construction. My eye caught the shoddy work mass production produces, the many shortcuts and compromises anyone building for profit incorporates into their latter-day masterpieces, yet the angles and high ceilings intrigued me. We might just be able to tolerate the shortcomings, which seemed slight after so very many deeply disappointing and genuinely disturbing viewings of places that clearly held no future for us. I'd about given up, suggesting that we might eke out an end of this exile existence in that tin can trailer park near her job. With an acquiescent sigh, I confided to The Muse that I could imagine myself living here, and she began negotiating.

Unthinkable now, in the current market, The Muse bid the owner down to precisely the price she wanted, the highest one we could possibly afford then, and to even the realtor's surprise, her bid was accepted. The house had a past, one checkered with a tragedy, and the owner had been aching to leave that past behind. It had been a rental since the original owner had died unexpectedly and his widow found she could not bear to live within the portrait of their former dream come true. The house had sat on the market for a few weeks without an offer, without even many lookers. The kitchen was primitive by modern home-buyers' standards, but it seemed workable enough to us since we'd been adapting for years and held the prospect of leaving behind our relocation housing Deluxe Executive Towne Home kitchen, which featured a forty watt Easy Bake® oven. A few short weeks later, we began cramming our stuff into these curious spaces. Moving in amounts to filling up hollow spaces. It seemed unlikely as the movers began unloading, that this once blank canvas could ever hold everything we possessed and all the stories that stuff represented. Moving In Day proved inspiring, though, as unnoticed corners became unexpected foci of attention.

The views were extraordinary from the first with the distant Front Range framing. The elk herd visited along the adjacent mountain and the movers briefly became gawkers, just like everyone does when those magnificent creatures appear. The following weeks filled themselves with a particularly painstaking filling up. Nothing seemed to quite fit anywhere at first. The movers left with seemingly half of our stuff sitting on the back deck in response to our indecision about just where it should sit. A passing squall resolved our indecision and the kitchen became our interim warehouse. It took weeks for us to sort out everything into its proper positions, with vestiges of much larger former residences hampering our performance. In the end, though, everything finally fit onto our new formerly blank canvas. Then we set about mostly looking at it, adding and overpainting as the changing seasons insisted, adapting to a deck garden due to deer intrusions and collapsing that garden just before each autumn's first snowstorm. After five years, we'd grown or somehow shrunk into the place before deciding that we'd turn it back into a blank canvas again.

The usual process for leaving a home involves hollowing out the space, but our process has seemed more of a HollowingIn. We're here to witness, indeed, to execute the necessary sorting and boxing up, the ten thousand fateful little decisions which will determine our next household's raw materials. Our exit reinforces our ownership as we undress what we once, so recently and also so very long ago, painstakingly decorated. Some things found their perfect instantiation here, their absolutely perfect position, and others never quite settled in, accepting unsettling acceptance of some temporary lack of perfection, hoping for better next time. Disassembly brings promise and produces a blank canvas. Moving out requires much more talent than does merely filling any blank canvas. A rarely-practiced technique produces blank canvasses without evident past and pregnant with future possibilities. Our one last gift to this place will be our permanent absence, like its original owners, provenance painted over yet somehow still present within. HollowingIn, this dance should properly continue into an eminently unforeseeable future.

©2021 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #HeadingHomeward, #PureSchmaltz