After a weekend that was a lot of fun, here I am back at home, still jobless, still taking care of a fussy baby, still out of anti-depressants, and feeling the Black Dog gnawing pretty hard on me.
Friday evening I drove up to Fort Worth to spend the weekend with a friend whom I met through the Poly Texas Talk listserv, and her family. The visit had several ends: to give me a change of scenery and a little time away from my own four walls, to help her work on preparing her hour for a historic neighborhood homes tour in three weeks (to which I’m invited, and which I may work as a docent), and to put a liveware person with the many, many ICQ messages and the phone conversations.
Well, I was perfectly delighted. Moon is just as much fun as I’d hoped she’d be—happy, smart, balanced. I like her husband (Big D) also; he’s intelligent and thoughtful, so he’s interesting to talk with, he’s in IT management (help desk manager) so we have enough IT in common to have something to talk about, not to mention that he appreciates a truly, horribly bad pun, and I’ve a million of those! Their children are civil and quite polite, except for their five-year-old daughter (little d) who, for some reason, attached herself to me for the weekend, wanting to share the bed with me (I politely squashed that), and repeatedly pushing past my personal-space boundaries (I sat hard on my basic tendency to snarl and roar in such cases, and deflected her as gently as I could). Granted that a five-year-old simply hasn’t learned to take social cues, I was very, very discomfited. Moon saw my distress and did her best to head little d off, but the child simply was not accepting hints or explanations, even from Mommy. I have no notion on earth why she decided to attach herself to me, unless it was a manifestation of the same instinct that makes a cat single out the one person in a roomful who’s horribly allergic to cats, and then sit in his lap, and rub against him, and generally make itself a prime-grade nuisance.
Moon and Big D’s house is a restoration in progress, and fascinating to an old-house devotée. (“Hi, my name is Sam, and I’m an old-house slut.”) It was built as a one-story Eastlake cottage in 1894, and had a second story added in 1920, changing its exterior profile to Prairie/Arts and Crafts style. (I advanced the theory over the weekend that it might have been a prefab house of the kind that Sears, Roebuck sold through their catalogues at the time, based on an architectural clue or two. This could be interesting to research.) Some cretinous previous owner had sold off most of the transoms and a pair of pocket doors, but fortunately the interior hadn’t been badly messed with, so a lot can be replaced, given time and periodic injections of money. They’re both doing their best not to create Inappropriate Alterations or remuddles.
Moon took me on a slow driving tour of the neighborhood (the Fairmount Historic District) Sunday, so I could get a feel for it, see what had been accomplished, and what there was yet to do. The area is a designated Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which gives the neighborhood more clout in stopping construction of out-of-character infill housing and teardowns. The area was plotted between the 1880s and 1905, roughly, so it’s absolutely brim-full of Arts and Crafts houses, with just about every other style of the period represented as well. The district was hit by urban blight after World War II and deteriorated into a scatteration of ill-maintained rental properties, but in the last twenty years people who want to save and restore the houses have begun moving back in. It’s now a crazy-quilt of restorations, works-in-progress, and run-down tenement leftovers, but as Moon put it, “we’re bringing the neighborhood back, one house at a time.”
Some of the tales she had to tell reminded me strongly of my own neighborhood, which went through the same process in the late 1970s and 1980s, and is going through a second wave of gentrification now. There have been confrontations over properties scheduled to be demolished, human chains formed in front of bulldozers, bloody battles fought before the zoning commission and city council, but so far the neighborhood seem to be winning most of them.
The work I did this weekend wasn’t very strenuous; I went around with the garden shears and pruned back dead growth and overgrowth, made a suggestion or two about how to clean out the sand filter for their above-ground swimming pool, and cleaned out a front flower bed that had been overgrown with crawling weeds, been sprayed, and halfway come back again. Once I got through, it was clear dirt and more or less ready for planting.
I also discovered a very dangerous store for the old-house enthusiast. At the other end of Moon’s block, in an old Piggly Wiggly grocery building (“old” meaning ca. 1925 and red brick), there’s a store that sells replacement and salvaged house parts and hardware. (Talk about the temptation of a child in a candy store!) I found enough doorknob backplates that match the ones in our house to replace all the plates missing from interior doors (the plates are aluminum, and NOBODY makes a reproduction anything like them; all you can find is brass, and brass, and brass, and more brass). This was definitely the place to go if you need glass or bakelite cabinet knobs and pulls, or bronze door hardware, or odd bathroom fittings, or any one of hundreds of other items needed to restore old houses in the 1865-1940 period.
This entry is going to have to be continued until tomorrow, because I have to get to bed, so I can get up for an 8:00 AM appointment with the medical research people.
The Dimension of Pain is the patron of the unpainted duck. Fnord.
