Today I’d like to touch upon a recurring theme: re-homing materials and items still potentially useful to others (if no longer to us). We’ve been fortunate over the years to pair Rosslyn’s storage capacity in the carriage barn and icehouse with local expertise — specifically sawyers with portable sawmills able to custom cut logs on our property — so that fallen and culled timber can be transformed into lumber. The stump-to-lumber ash and elm flooring that was so recently installed during the icehouse rehab, up-bumping the character quotient dramatically, was not completely exhausted during installation. In fact, there’s enough surplus that I’m hoping to use it on a future project. But a short term opportunity arose to share some of this material with my nephews for a small but soon to be eye-popping outbuilding in their Rock Harbor renovation.
Re-Homing Stump-to-Lumber Ash & Elm (Photo: Christoph Aigner)
That sneak peek above illustrates the handsome walls and ceiling in what will become a dedicated workspace located a short plein air passage from the house. Looks a lot like the new floor in Rosslyn’s icehouse, right?
Soon this stump-to-lumber paneling will be paired with more re-homed Rosslyn material: Brazilian cherry (Jatoba) flooring remaining from our 2007-8 dining room rehabilitation.
Reimagine, Re-Home, Reuse
From reimagining to rehoming and reusing, Susan and I have been pretty obsessed with creative ways to revitalize and reboot whenever possible. Yes, that’s a whole lot of re-prefixing! I did mention obsession, right?
Baked into the icehouse rehab (and sooo much of our +/-17 year love affair with Rosslyn) is the inclination to salvage and rehabilitate, to recycle and upcycle, to repurpose and reuse… we’ve been keen to reimagine obsolete and abandoned artifacts in new, useful ways. (Source: Re-Homing Exterior Door)
Another similar opportunity, repurposing a pre-hung door, came up recently.
Sustainability is intrinsically rooted in responsible innovation. We strive to incorporate full cycle, cradle-to-grave thinking into our creative endeavors. A half century of combined construction and renovation experience has taught Susan and me that every project is part of a bigger whole, a small arc in a much larger continuum. And Rosslyn’s endurance, a two century story of repeat reinvention, enriches our confidence and our commitment to responsible re-prefixing whenever possible.
So much of our good fortune as Rosslyn’s stewards has been inherited from generations before us. Responsible ownership, conscientious preservation, and magnanimous spirits account for the life we’ve enjoyed on this property. We endeavor to follow in that tradition… (Source: Re-Homing John Deere AMT 626
Yes, Rosslyn has been far more than a home. She’s been our companion and our teacher.
Rosslyn has tutored us in the merits of conservation and preservation, rehabilitation and reinvention, generosity and sharing. (Source: Re-Homing Exterior Door)
And so it has made perfect sense to extend Rosslyn’s generosities to others. And perhaps my nephews’ workspace will afford them a small reminder from time-to-time of the property where they made many memories between childhood and adulthood.
The art of home is a tidy title with an unpretentious posture. And yet it’s idealistic and evocative, ample and ambitious. Frankly, its restrained and self contained first impression is a little misleading. Maybe even a little ambiguous. What do I even mean? I’m not offering a catchy epithet for design and decor. Nor architecture. And yet, it certainly may include some or all of these. When I describe the art of home, I’m conjuring several things at once.
In conjoining art and creativity with home-ness, I’m alluding to my own personal outlook on an intrinsic relationship between the two as well as an aspirational goal. Home isn’t science. Or, home isn’t only science (or even mostly science.) Sure, there’s science and math and all manner of practical, detail and data driven inputs in transforming a house into a home. But there’s much more. There’s a profoundly personal, subjective, intimate relationship at play in the act of homemaking. And, in the best of circumstances, essential circumstances in my opinion, home becomes a sanctuary for creating, an oasis for art.
All of this binds art-ing and homing. The art of home is a look at the homeness of art and the art of homing. It is an attempt to discern what allows one’s domestic sanctuary to transcend mere utility (a garage to cache one’s car, a grill to sear one’s supper, a nest within which to sleep, a shower with which to wash away the sleep and sweat), to transcend the housing function and become a place of growth and nurturing, an incubation space, a revitalizing space, a dreaming and dream-fulfilling space,…
In the photograph at the top of this post you can see the icehouse, mid-rehabilitation, tucked in beside the carriage barn, both frosted in snow like fairy tales illustrations or gingerbread confections. After a decade and a half my slowly percolating art of home has matured from a pipe dream into a concept into a clutch of sketches into construction plans into a creative collaborative of many. And for a few short weeks I’m privileged to participate daily, to engage in a real and hands-on way after participating from afar, participating virtually. It’s a peculiar but exciting transition. An ongoing transition.
The Art of Home: Poem Excerpt
I’ve been excavating through layers of creativity compressed into, and coexisting within, my notion of homeness. While shaping a house into a home is in and of itself a creative art — indeed a nearly universal creative art, even among those quick to volunteer that they are not artistic, not creative — I’m deeply curious about my awn associations with home as a cradle and catalyst of art. I’m trying to tease apart these different layers of art in a still embryonic poem, so I’ll include only a section about gardening, a creative pursuit that I inherited from my mother decades ago.
...composing a garden,
my own personal patch,
from selecting seeds —
corn, radishes pumpkins,
tomatoes, and sunflowers —
to turning the soil,
working compost
into last summer's
stems and stalks,
into clay clodded dirt,
into July-August hopes.
Watering and weeding,
thinning, scarecrowing,
suckering, and staking...
Composing a garden is but one of the many instances that the art of home means something to me. Cooking. Writing. Telling stories. Pruning the orchard. Entertaining guests. Landscaping. Drawing. Adapting old buildings into new lifestyle enabling and enriching spaces.
The Art of Home: Documentary
At the heart of Rosslyn Redux is a quest to discern and describe what I’m learning about the art of home. But there is still more question than answer. I’m still untangling my thoughts, still reaching for some sort of clarity that might improve my ability to communicate concisely what I have found so captivating, and why it has obsessed me for so long.
But I’m not there there. My journey is ongoing. So I will, for now, offer another perspective on the art of home, a captivating documentary that obliquely sheds light upon our Santa Fe / Essex home duality.
Two indigenous artists create new works reflecting on their tribal homelands, the Wind River Indian Reservation. Ken Williams (Arapaho) is a Santa Fe art celebrity and Sarah Ortegon (Shoshone) is an up-and-coming actress in Denver. Both artists travel to Wind River Reservation to reconnect with their ancestors and present their art work to a somewhat isolated community. (Source: The Art of Home: A Wind River Story,PBS)
Intertwined with Sarah Ortegon’s and Ken Williams’s extended meditation on the relationships between art, creative expression, identity, home, culture, family, and belonging are the perspectives of other Native Americans including George Abeyta who touches on home as a place of strength.
“Your home, it’s a place of your family. It’s a place of warmth and comfort and strength and happiness. It’s the place where were you look forward to going because that’s your stronghold. That’s your place of prayer.” — George Abeyta
In the context of beadwork Abeyta is examining it feels seamless and comfortable the way we moves from beading motifs to home as a bastion of strength, as a stronghold. Also a space where family, warmth, comfort, happiness, and even prayer coexist. Perhaps even where they are rooted, where they thrive. The subject of his reflection, a beaded ornament akin to a necktie, is an intricate work of art, and as such it functions as a vehicle or a vessel to showcase and honor these fundamental elements. This notion of home, and more specifically the art of home, as a sort of sacred space for strength and belonging, for identity and connectedness, for family and for happiness resurfaces throughout this documentary. I encourage you to make time (just under an hour) to appreciate it from beginning-to-end.
Today’s dispatch delves into a puzzling enigma, maybe even a genuine mystery.
Shortly after purchasing Rosslyn in the summer of 2006 friends were touring the house with us when their young son blasted through a doorway.
“Do you think this house is haunted?!”
His optimism was palpable. He related in quick chronicle what he’d discovered during his solo inspection of the house. On the third floor, he assured us, there are hidden doors and secret passageways. Mystery and intrigue percolated in his proud delivery.
He was correct. Small doors and mystery access panels in the backs of cupboards and closets opened into dark attic soffits. However, years of renovation would eventually reveal that these were simply entrances to otherwise inaccessible passages (ie. space behind the point where rafters met knee walls) that permitted service to electric, plumbing, etc. Practical. But slim on mystery.
Shortly thereafter, multiple contractors assured us that the house was probably haunted. Two centuries of living (and, inevitably, at least some “expiring”) within these walls *must* have resulted in a few lingering spirits. Certainly Rosslyn was haunted, right? Right?! Again, a blend of dread and intrigue. But over the yearslong renovation, they gradually abandoned their soothsaying as uneventful days (and not a few evenings) dispelled their early convictions. Mystery anticipated; mystery dispelled.
The Warmth of Your House
Verum Archaeologiam
Across the sprawling inquiry I call Rosslyn Redux, I’ve gathered many posts into a category I call “Archeology of Home”. It’s a moniker I usually use in a quasi metaphorical sense, but not always. In fact, there have been plenty of instances in which we’ve quite literally disinterred and studied artifacts that have informed our understanding (and appreciation) of home.
Sometimes the excavation is figurative, exposing ideas and memories and stories and memories that, when scrutinized reveal what underpins my/our ideas of homeness. In either case, analysis (and sometimes creative exploration) or both real relics and those that exist in the realm of concept have deepened and affirmed our relationship with home.
Today I have an intriguing outlier to share. It’s archeology of home in the layered and often complex sense. And it invites inclusion in my intermittent what-makes-a-house-a-home series: does mystery make a house a home?
Ute Youth, Uintah Valley, Utah (Photo: John K. Hillers, Powell Expedition, 1871-1875)
Concealed Artifacts Considered
While drafting a post that revisits my enduring curiosity about (and reference to) The Farm I asked Katie to remove an old black and white photograph from its frame in order to scan it. Here’s our slightly abbreviated dialogue.
Katie, I’m hoping… you might be able to help me with the photo that I’d like to accompany this post. If you look at the B&W snapshot attached you’ll see a photo of me as a small tyke with an older man. I’m hoping that it may be easy to remove the image and scan it at high definition… Thanks!
I scanned this photo for you. Did you know there were some other photos behind this one in the frame? I scanned everything in case you were interested…
Oh, what a find. You have no idea how moved and intrigued I am by your totally unanticipated discovery. I received this photo from my parents when they were preparing to downsize their Rock Harbor home a year or two before selling it. I imagine they must have repurposed an older frame that contained the images and information you’ve come across. The man in the photo in “Upper Volta” (newly independent from France as of 1960 and then renamed Burkina Faso in 1984) is my uncle Herman Gail Weller, my mother‘s older brother. He was in the U.S. Peace Corps, living in Africa (Ghana and later Liberia, if I recall correctly) in the 1960s when this photograph was apparently taken. No idea about the Ute news clipping and photo. I’ll reach out to my uncle to see what I can find out. What a fascinating layering of history. And what a wild surprise! Thank you, Katie.
I’ll return to the “older man” (aka OMC) when I publish the relevant post soon. But that youthful photograph of my uncle offered a subject for my inquiry.
Uncle Herman in Bobo-Dioulasso, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), 1967
Herman in Burkina Faso
I sent out an email (with scans of the photos, etc.) to my mother and my uncle. Circuitously the following message made its way back to me.
“The pictures came through on the email from George that you forwarded to me. The pictures were huge compared to the font size of the text. So I had to scroll back and forth and up and down. ….. Of course that was me in Bobo-Djou… in a market. The blankets were called “Mali blankets,” at least by expatriots. Most expatriots that I met in West Africa prized Mali blankets. My beard was nicer in red (then) than in white (now).
The width of each strip in a Mali blanket was the width that a typical loom created. When I traveled to Bamako, Mali one Christmastime, I saw weavers sitting on the sidewalks along the modern paved highway, each with his loom cords tied to the base of a modern street light.
Ah-ha! A few more details in Herman’s notes on reverse of photo.
Caption from Uncle Herman’s Photo in Bobo-Dioulasso, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso)
Another uncanny aside: that Mali blanket hung in my bedroom as a tapestry during my teens. Also a sword from Herman’s West Africa years!
Ute Youth
And what about the handsome fellow with his dog appearing earlier this post?
So far no recollection from Herman to share on this one. Did one of my parents place it in the frame? Someone else. When? Why? The mystery endures.
Let’s take a look at the other artifacts, which at least explain something about the Ute youth, if not its provenance.
Citation for Photograph of Ute Youth by John K. Hillers
This documentation from the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology, Bureau of American Ethnology, Collection is affixed to the back of the photo of the Ute youth. If too blurry for you, here’s the gist.
Neg. No. 1537
Tribe: Ute
“Indian boy and his dog.”
Uintah Valley, eastern slope of the Wasateh Mts., Utah.
By John K. Hillers, Powell Expedition, 1871-1875.
I’m unclear how the Ute youth photo with documentation (above) happen to be located together with the article (below), but the caption (also below) suggests that the image may have been used to illustrate the compelling news clipping.
Ute Caption and Article
Also resonating subtly but pleasantly, the recollection that my maternal grandmother (mother to my mother and Herman) often mailed us news clippings that struck her as individually relevant and appealing. Perhaps she came across and clipped the article, and then sent it to my mother or my uncle?
Perhaps the trappings of home and the lives they echo, albeit sometimes a faintly fading echo, are among the mysteries that make a house a home?
Afterward
The lead image on this post is a dedication, a mystery dedication, that adorns a cardboard panel at the back of the frame. For whom? From whom? Well, we know their name, but who are/were they? I have absolutely no idea, but the sentiment is uncannily appropriate for the current context.
“May the warmth of your house be equal to that of your heart.” — Gerry and Marc Gurvitch
Appropriate, for sure. And perhaps it’s worth gathering well wishes wherever and whenever we come across them.
