Our Vermont house is a joy. It’s easy to host the family for holidays, fun to have friends here for a weekend. I love the kitchen and the garden; my husband enjoys his office space and revels in providing wood for the stove we burn all winter long.
But there’s another side to living here: David’s knee replacement a year ago was a challenge for us both. The surgeon promised he could negotiate the steep stairs to the bedroom where he would recuperate. Indeed, he could. It was the 20 or more trips I made each day, to refresh the ice, bring the soup, help with the stocking, that made us wonder.
Were we getting closer to another move, aging out of our present lifestyle? At the moment, as fall chores call on us to put the garden to bed, stack the wood, and ready the snowblower for the first storm, we raise the question again.
“Our house is our corner of the world,” says Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space.
Houses bespeak identity, if the fit is right. So far, it appears we have been lucky. But wait: Making the choice of where to live involves more than good luck. This leads to a second question: In a future home, what would we be after? Where we have lived before, it turns out, is informative.
Years ago, we stood in front of the large plate glass window of a real estate office on the Upper West Side of Manhattan looking at possible rentals. Grad school was ending for my husband, and I was pregnant. One option as we looked ahead was to stay in the city. We had loved both our tiny Riverside Drive apartment and our connections to New York. But when David, a newly ordained protestant minister, accepted a parish in a small town in Westchester County, the fantasy faded fast. We packed up, baby and all, and headed north.
It was that parsonage on a tiny piece of land right next to the church that first taught me to weigh carefully what was suitable or unsuitable about a house. The church’s house, close to a busy road, was sided with gray asbestos shingles and furnished by the women’s society with gleanings from their annual rummage sale. I landed hard in a place that felt mostly wrong. My husband, it turned out, was more adaptive.
“You think you can convince the trustees to rent out this parsonage and give us a housing allowance?” he asked incredulously when I finally proposed moving. “This is nice; we’ve got three bedrooms in addition to my office, and you have a study on the third floor. We pay no rent.”
But I needed to get out of there, and he understood. I was almost a church employee, on call for whatever might happen next door. And too many parishioners walked right into my kitchen with barely a knock. Even with the urgent wrongness, though, there were positive aspects.
We made vital, fulfilling connections within the community — both of church members and the larger area. We learned to be parents living there, and we got creative. For our daughter’s bedroom we cobbled together the right crib, rocking chair, wall hangings and, eventually, toy cupboard. Between the two of us, my husband and I designed a play area in the living room for her. He made a wooden apple crate into a pretend stove with paint and a little imagination, and I sewed quilts for all of the doll babies that arrived for her to take care of.
There were blackberries in the woods nearby and I made jam, a skill I have expanded on over the years. We arranged a puppy whelping room in the basement where we midwifed litters of West Highland white terriers into the world, kindling our devotion to the dog breed we still have. And I always looked forward to Christmas. With visits from our Iowa families, we got good at making the plans. We explored the art of an annual holiday party by inviting in the entire parish for an evening. There was a lot to remember when we finally moved.
Our next home, supported by the church’s housing allowance, was in the same town. For all of us, it remains “the Mills Road house.” Cozy but light and on a quiet, rural acreage, it was good for everyone, including, by then, a second daughter. My husband continued his job at the church and both of us, our ties to the community. He and I also progressed quickly into our back-to-the land years, no surprise given that it was the 1970s. There was room for vegetable gardens as well as space for beehives and an orchard. Tapping our maple trees to make syrup, we learned the hard way to start heating the sap on the outside fireplace rather than in the kitchen — where the wallpaper rolled to the floor during our first long boil. I canned and froze our produce, made yogurt and bread. Those fulfilling aspects of our years there still linger.
When that life became too rural and too time-consuming, we looked to streamline. A house in a larger town nearby provided some needed flexibility. My commute to a school in southern Westchester was easier, the train to Manhattan was within walking distance, and our daughters had more freedom — to have jobs in town, meet up with friends, study at the library. Having less stuff and fewer demands from the property felt good. And in changing our location — moving eight miles away — we had opportunities for added friendships and activities.
From there, at the time of my first retirement from teaching, we were lured to Vermont. The attraction was a daughter and her family already settled here and deeply rooted. What a good decision! Vermont has offered us variations on the places, spaces, projects, opportunities and communities that have made our lives worthwhile.
And next? It’s hard to know, but we clearly have a lot to draw on in thinking about a future house — one that would, like its predecessors, become familiar and comfortable. A place to be ourselves.
Mary K. Otto lives in Norwich.