On a good day, the house held the promise of gracious, Victorian splendor coaxed forth by a little elbow grease and patience:
- generous rooms,
- tall ceilings,
- deep baseboards, and
- delicately carved headers crowning every door and window opening, eleven of them in the dining room alone.
Master-craftsman details delighted the eye at every turn:
- intricate, etched glass here,
- delicate flowers on a porcelain door knob there,
- an elegant oval burnished keyhole plate in each door–even the massive paneled pocket door between the parlor and the dining room.
- a golden oak banister and richly carved newel post topped by a cannonball that hands had smoothed over the ages.
The house offered space for the children, the pleasure of restoration for dad, and beauty in countless details for mom.
On a mediocre day, the house was a tease; a sliver of progress conceded after a morning of hard work and serious, focused paint removal . . . just enough hope to keep the paint stripper and steel wool close at hand, the joint compound and trowel, the shop vac and scraper.
On a mediocre day, the house exposed their faulty estimation of exactly how much effort the handyman special required. It reminded them of their blind spot, their failure to consider all the angles. On a mediocre day the house humbled them; but they stayed with the challenge.
On a bad day the house was harsh punishment for their foolish, gross error in judgment. It was:
- stubborn layers of pink paint covering the woodwork of the eleven door and window openings in the dining room.
- black enamel paint that defied paint stripper on the floors.
- windows they had to prop open.
- pantry cupboards that flaked paint and plaster.
- a furnace that clanged noisily each time it kicked on.
It was mice that traversed the basement pipes, sometimes venturing into the family’s living space, and a renegade woodpecker that relentlessly drilled holes in the porch columns. It was layers of yellowed wallpaper on the ceilings, crumbling plaster, cracked windows, and frayed and worn, decades-old carpet. It was shingles that took flight with a strong wind, and a basement that doubled as a cistern when it rained. It was dozens of old and broken details that cried, “Me, me, fix me!”
But on a really bad day – or a bad night like this steamy July evening. . . .
- with a full day’s worth of humidity tightening the screws on any remnant of pleasure, and
- every surface damp and every kid sweaty and the baby teething, and
- the stack of limp bills waiting to be paid, and the unwashed dishes on the kitchen table, and
- the box fans laboring to displace hot air from inside with hot air from outside . . .
. . . on a night like this, the house was thoroughly hopeless.
She bathed the kids in a peachy-beige enamel tub, a tint that didn’t quite match the sink that didn’t quite match the toilet, that didn’t match the fake, masonite “tile” paneling – four different shades of ugly.
Pink and green cabbage roses on the wallpaper took over where the fake paneling stopped and carried the mismatched theme right up to the ceiling. The crummy, unraveling green-gray carpet underfoot (that stalled her vacuum each time she cleaned) completed the tragedy. The kids dripped on it as she toweled them off.
There’s nothing quite like an upstairs bedroom on a night like this, when even the banister seems damp with sweat and the sheets lose their cool in seconds.
They went through the rituals nonetheless:
- the prayers,
- the talk,
- naming three happy things that happened that day,
- the glass of water,
- the fan adjustment.
Soon Mr. Rogers sang from a tape recorder to the three-year-old as strains of Beethoven’s Ninth filled the five-year-old’s room.
“Strange bedfellows,” she thought as she scooped up the miserable, slobbering baby in her arms and headed toward the stairs.
As mother and child descended together, the grand and glorious symphonic strings faded along with Mr. Roger’s comforting revelation that “you can never go down, never go down, never go down the drain.”
If any part of the house had a right to cry, “Me, me, fix me,” it was the porch. They had dismantled its railings and spindles early in their ownership, a start at restoration. Half of the porch now resided in bundles in the garage.
The light blue paint on the tongue-and-groove bead board ceiling had been a nightmare to remove and some past homeowner’s solution for the floor – turquoise indoor/outdoor carpet hastily stapled over the high-maintenance, tongue and groove floorboards – screamed “retire me” each time she saw it. Truthfully, she couldn’t bear to rip it up to survey the work that awaited them underneath.
But the comfortable little maple porch rocker with its rush-woven seat and gently curved ladder back, proved a faithful friend. She and the baby settled easily into it, welcoming its invitation to take a load off. They’d been here before. The baby’s whimpers faded quickly with the familiar comfort of the chair, and the whining in her own spirit wound down. Crickets chirruped and fireflies glittered as that faithful-friend of a rocker eased into a gentle, rolling rhythm.
They’d start with little songs – “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” “The ABCs,” “Jack and Jill.”
“There was a farmer had a dog and Bingo was its name-o.”
She sang about ten little Indians and Minnie Minnie HaHa who went to see her papa, and a cow that leaped so high into the night sky that it pulled off a lunar orbit (while a plate and its companion spoon made a fast getaway).
She sang about a farmer who took a wife, who took a child, who took a dog; and another whose musically-gifted animals sang a single tune, each in its own tongue: “here a moo, there a moo, everywhere a moo moo.”
The baby’s eyes closed.
- She sang about an old lady who swallowed a fly and a spider, a bird and a cat, a dog, goat, and cow.
- She sang about a lazy fool named Henry who refused to fix the hole in his bucket and his nagging wife, Liza, whose incessant demands proved just as annoying as her husband’s excuses.
- She sang some cheery verses about men working on the railroad, and
- an unnamed, but much anticipated teamster lady who’d drive six white horses ‘round a mountain before sitting down to a meal of chicken and dumplings with her happy hosts.
- She sang about a mama promising to buy her baby a bird, a ring, and a looking glass.
The baby sighed one of those deep, satisfying, “settling in” sighs, and peace came upon them both.
The little maple rocker never disappointed
The big, old house, diamond-in-the-rough as it was, may have seemed hopeless, but the rocker never disappointed. From its vantage point, the porch didn’t look so bad; the reality of three kids under the age of six didn’t seem so overwhelming; and even the prospect of making the house payments, feeding the family, and managing the bills on her husband’s shoestring of a social worker’s paycheck didn’t make her wish for another life.
“Jesus loves me,” she sang to her sweet, slumbering bundle, “this I know, for the Bible tells me so . . .” The pure comfort in those words ushered in a sweet, soul-satisfying flood of divine love songs.
“Oh how He loves you and me, oh how He loves you and me. He gave His life, what more could He give. . . .”
“Love divine, all love’s excelling; joy of heaven to earth come down. Fix in us thy humble dwelling, all thy faithful mercies crown . . .”
“Amazing love, how can it be that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?”
The verses came to her effortlessly, one glorious word picture after another; healing, lifting, nudging the mother and child ever closer toward hope and joy and the unfathomable depths of Jesus’ love, so big that it dwarfed her weary anxieties, dwarfed her failures of the day, dwarfed this enormous project of a house, dwarfed the hard parts of mothering, and of loving.
The baby grew heavy with blessed, deepening sleep, but she kept rocking and singing quietly into the night, loving her little one, loving the goodness of her God, loving the promise of renewal and restoration.
“What wondrous love is this, oh my soul, oh my soul? What wondrous love is this, oh my soul? What wondrous love is this, that caused the Lord of Life to lay aside His crown for my soul, for my soul? To lay aside His crown for my soul?”
The porch, the rocker, the baby–a trifecta of divine renewal.
Photo of rocker by Wassim Chouak on Unsplash
Morris Sampler 