Conversation with a House

Conversation with a House

I’ll be performing this piece with guitarist Don Latarski at the 10^th annual The Nature of Gratitude program this coming Sunday, November 16, at 3 p.m. at Unity of the Valley, 3912 Dillard Road, in Eugene, Oregon. Eric Alan and I co-created this event in 2015, and much to our surprise the program and we have coevolved in positive ways. This year our collaborators are poet Jorah LaFleur, writer Melissa Hart, with music by Halie Loren, Daniel Gallo, David-Jacobs Strain, Laura Dubois, Don Latarski, and Nisha Calkins. Admission is FREE. However, we will be raising money and awareness in support of Black Thistle Street Aid, a nonprofit organization of volunteer medical practitioners, herbalists & advocates who provide access to free healthcare for people experiencing houselessness in the Eugene-Springfield area. I hope you can join us.

If you’re interested in exploring what Don and I have done together, check out this video from The Nature of Gratitude program in 2024. I’m reading “Spirits,” a piece from my book Palindrome: Grateful Reflections from the Home Ground.

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The first big rainstorm of autumn hung off the coast like a crouched animal, dark and heavy with humidity. After two solo days weatherproofing the new porch on the old house, the pickup was packed for the trip back to town. Spits of rain became sheets thrashed by wind that tormented the boughs of Douglas-firs around the meadow. This house in the heart of the Coast Range, built by my great-uncle Johnny, is my thinnest place. October is my thinnest month. And an incoming storm is my thinnest moment. The deluge drumming the metal roof demanded serious attention.

Friends, someone had to tell you … I talk with old houses.

Old House with the long memory, you haven’t forgotten the sweat-stain of last July when my grandsons and I tore off your decaying porch. Rusty nails screeched. Boards faded blue cracked apart, and paper wasps swirled from a basketball-size nest hidden below the roof. Old wood and metal fell to the lawn while Edmund and Chris pulled it away and piled it along the garden fence. Only then did I realize how painful this dismantling must have been for you. That you were losing pieces of yourself that had been measured and cut and nailed by Uncle Johnny.

My carpenter friend Alan offered to help with your healing. Thank god he didn’t know what he was getting into. To be truthful, you and I have been a pain in his ass. He didn’t know that your front wall is an inch out of square. He didn’t know that we had already talked and that you had agreed to this rehabilitation only if the lumber was made from this place. He didn’t know that my homemade lumber is a lot like my brain—it doesn’t conform to straight lines or sharp boundaries.

Yet Alan persisted with patience and grace. We all persisted. Through the oven hot days of August while the new Raven family cavorted in a cobalt sky. When grandson Chris and I milled the boards that would become the porch roof from logs that had been trees I helped plant fifty years ago at my childhood home, trees that toppled in an ice storm and were salvaged by Chris and my brother Tim and me. Logs that taught a seven-year-old how to run a sawmill.

We persisted into parched September and those tired evenings when Sun slouched onto the western ridge. Alan and I sat in the front yard with cold beers and Fritos while dark-eyed Doe brought her two yearlings in search of early windfall apples. When Swainson’s Thrushes forgot their morning songs and silence stretched ominously toward autumn. When Pileated Woodpecker broke the drama, hooting with laughter and drumming the old trees above the meadow with wild abandon. When praying mantis looked on from a fresh rough-cut 4 x 4.

Now the October rain is hammering your new porch, my thin place reborn. From here you and I can dance between the present moment and a deeper past. We came into being because 150 years ago my great-grandfather needed more light and space to grow. James Gunter was smart and driven and wanted to be a doctor, a healer, but his Midwest farming family was too poor to support his education. He paid 300 bucks for a piece of land ten miles downriver. Maybe it was his frustrated aspirations to heal that fueled a molten rage that scarred his wife and kids, including my grandmother. Not long ago I stood by his grave and let my smoldering anger flare then fade into the deepening shadows of a summer dusk. He’d been gone almost ninety years. Forgiveness sometimes feels like dissipation.

Old House, you and I hadn’t yet come into the world that year Mom and Dad were living 12 miles downriver. My older brother Tommy Glen was dying, doomed by genetics to gasp for oxygen in a world of green trees and uncorrupted air. In March Mom’s father succumbed to lung cancer. But T.S. Eliot had it right; April really is the cruelest month. While reckless blossoms of lady slipper, bleeding heart, and wild iris bloomed with life-affirming abandon, Tommy Glen breathed his last. In those times doctors were therapists, and Mom and Dad were told to have another baby right away. I was conceived while they searched their days darkened by grief for rays of light in a new beginning. And so it was that Tommy Glen and I became forever one. We share more than our name—we are the conjoined siblings of light and shadow.

Old House, is it any wonder I want to heal everything? Is it any wonder I’m often angry when I can’t? And yet I won’t cast out my shadows. They are the dark matter, the neutron star, the concentrated energy that built your new porch, part of the fuel that feeds my soul. I know the light is there, too. Because without it my shadows would disappear.

Tell us, then, Old House. How can we reconcile our opposing life forces? How can we reach with outstretched arms and gather in the entire complexity of our being? Show us those thin places between our darkness and our light. The spaces where Peace is found in the truest forms of forgiveness, love, and gratitude for our unique lives. May we find shelter from our storms beneath a new porch built by many hands.