The preservation of old things
In which we scratch and scrape at the surface of history and memory, and perhaps become a little raw from the effort
Hungary
I wrote a poem about our house before I ever saw it.
I imagined what it would be like to push open the door and step across the threshold, to breathe in the mundane secrets of the lives that had filled its rooms before we arrived, before it became ours. Specifically, I was enchanted with the idea of rustic furniture, charming dishes, and quaint odds and ends — all of it old, of course.
My excitement about the treasures to be discovered was, however, lightly sobered by the gravitas of our having acquired the house only through the grace of the elderly woman who had lived here having passed away. The siblings, for all the complicated reasons governing family relationships, had come to the conclusion that they had no better choice than to sell their humble inheritance and divvy up the proceeds. Bit of a downer, that.
Still, I was enthralled with the idea of this time capsule, of stepping into, however briefly and incompletely, a life and a place that were completely foreign to my own.
By the time I got to see the house (it certainly did not yet feel like ours), more than a year had elapsed. Husband and Mother-in-Law had both independently spent several weeks in it alone, during which time they had cleaned, reorganized objects and moved furniture, made discoveries, struggled and marveled, and shared their experiences of the property.
The house was most decidedly not a diamond in the rough. The furniture was dime-a-dozen high-gloss mass-produced particle-board kitsch. Every household in Hungary seems to have a version of these same shelves and cupboards. They are the symbolic after taste of an era. Some have square black knobs, others round black knobs. Everything is nothing more than cheap veneer. What it lacked in charm, it made up for in weight. The particular furniture we inherited had the distinction of also being damp and rotten.
There were spiders and other creepy crawlies galore to go along with a dust and mildew smell that permeated, no matter how we left the windows and door open.
Anything made out of real wood was broken, disintegrating, wobbly and bug-eaten. Some pieces were serviceable, but only in comparison to the rest, and only if you didn’t look too closely.
And did I mention the house was full of furniture? Chock full.
There were some quaint old things I wanted to keep: the doors and their hardware, an armoire, the retro kitchen furniture stashed in the outdoor “summer kitchen.” There’s the pig butchering table now lying on its side in the yard, the wood crates and wicker baskets now tumbled atop a pile of bricks back, and a collection of rusted metal hardware in a bin. All of it is — in some way — broken.
Most everything else has taken its turn at the curb, been pawned off onto neighbours, or hefted into a container. Some we managed to take out for lomtalanitas1 — a day that you might think would fill every treasure-seeking road-sider’s heart with joy, except it falls seriously short of expectations.
What, of it all, remains?
Our beds
The wicker clothes hamper with the top that never stays on straight because it is attached by a twisted piece of wire
The washing machine that we use for really grubby items
A few dishes and pots
A couple of signs (“Tiszta udvar, rendes ház” and “Gondozott virágos porta”)
The sun-charred and abused plastic lawn chairs
A dented aluminum watering can
A sámli or hokedli or two
A couple of pillows
Makeshift lace curtains
The garden bench that no one should dare sit on
The large aluminum spoon we use to dish out the dog food
A couple of old demijohns
And there’s one more thing: an old kitchen table.
New Brunswick
We’re nearing the end of our major renovations in Hungary and preparing for our next undertaking.
This spring, I went to New Brunswick to see the property and house we bought sight unseen in 2021. We had photos and drone footage and a home inspection report along with my son’s account of having visited briefly last year. But two years after having purchased the place, neither Husband nor I had yet seen it in person.
That house, too, had seen better days. By the time I got there, there was a layer of mildew on the walls and doors, the paint was peeling off in great swathes and accumulating in layers on the floor, and the dead flies were thick at the base of windows. The living flies lent a low humming to the upstairs rooms, like the faint hum of a far off lawn mower, or the anxious expectation that something is about to happen.
But nothing happened, nothing changed, except the weather, which wandered in as light and shadow across the vista of mountains and valleys, trees and fields. I imagined what it would be like to sit in an armchair, idle as the cluster flies, tilting in that listing section over the front porch with windows on three sides.
But first, we will need to peel back the layers, bring the house down to its structure, repair its broken bones, soothe its rashes and wounds. In the process, we will discover rooms of hidden heartache and suppressed joy; we will build it back up to be homey and welcoming; and we will plant apple trees, build a large deck, and explore the expanse of woods out back.
Ontario
There’s another house, the one I think of as home, that waits in limbo for its next chapter. And I prefer not to think about that. But the time will come when we will sell it to new owners who will hopefully marvel at its charming corners and perhaps shake their heads sadly at its neglect. There was so much that needed doing that didn’t get done, and so many ways we could have done better, but for our being naïve and not knowing how.
New Brunswick
I met with three contractors in New Brunswick. One, a bright, energetic spirit who seemed keen and equal to the challenge. The second, quieter and thoughtful, who seemed capable, if lacking a crew. The third, hesitant and reluctant, wanted nothing to do with the first stages of the work but said he would be interested in coming in for the finishing.
As we waited for the first two to contractors to send us their estimates and availabilities, we considered who we might hire for the job, and how present we might need to be. Husband was prepared to fly there and spend two months living in the outbuilding on a cot to oversee the work, and we braced ourselves mentally and emotionally for what that would entail. By the time we got the rough estimate from the first contractor, we had pretty well decided to move ahead with her (all things being equal), when I received an email from the second contractor.
He didn’t have a quote for us, but he told us that a renovation of the scope we were looking at would be expensive, and had we considered demolishing and building new instead?2
These two options — renovating vs building new — do not even remotely exist on the same plane. One is old-world charm with crooked floors and real wood moldings, stairs, and bannisters; it is quirks and oddities and a slower approach to living, fresh cut wildflowers, curtains dancing in the breeze, and faces flushed with outdoors work. There’s far less efficiency, and yet far more of it. There other is nothing more than generic cookie cutter suburbia.
Despite the house’s state of disrepair, it is more solid and more firmly planted in the land than the new-fangled constructions with their off-gassing man-made materials and air-tight energy saving systems.
Hungary
I have moved the kitchen table — the old one — from room to room, insisting that it not be chucked, not be put in a situation that would cause it further damage, beyond what would be salvageable, because I like it. There were other things I proclaimed that I liked and wanted to preserve, despite it not always being reasonable to do so — but these items did not make it through the winter.
I managed to keep the table from the dump pile, to protect it from the rain and from Jozsi’s chaotic work habits. It remained, woodwormed and wobbly, coated in at least three layers of paint, until early this summer. I put the heat gun and some good old-fashioned elbow grease into it (thanks, mom, for the training), and scraped her down through green, white, orange, brown, to the wood. More or less.
When I started writing this (two months ago now). I had many good metaphors. I had plenty of time to think and contemplate life as I worked my way around the table’s edges and corners, its uneven, cracked and softened surfaces. The drone of the heat gun drowned out the barking of the dogs and my other priorities, and my thoughts wandered.
I planned to write something very elegant and touching about the way the heat gun made the paint bubble and become crisp, drawing finely veined parallels to aging skin and the effort required to cut through the accumulating crap of life, to work hard to bare one’s beauty and vulnerability, to shed one’s crusty, jaded and worn exterior. But it now seems a trite and overused metaphor. There’s nothing new under the sun, it’s all been done before, yadda yadda.
Still, there’s something to it.
I scraped off the layers of paint — some were more resistant than others — and then went at it with the handheld orbital sander. Back to the heat gun, and back to the sander. The goal, to be perfectly clear, was not — is never, for me — perfection.
I got it down to a somewhat bare pale wood. I sponged it with a vinegar solution and then, because the next morning there was still some new frass, I washed it down with a chemical against woodworm. Then I applied a kind of beeswax finish that soaked in, leaving the surface water repellant with a matte finish. There’s still plenty of residual color and I haven’t even attempted to glue the wobbles out of it.
As a final touch, I replaced the old knobs with round dainty and shiny cut glass knobs. These also wobble.
I’m sure the neighbours and others who chanced to see me working on the table think I’m really nutty to have put that much work into this old thing — it’s not valuable, it’s not what you could call antique, and it’s in poor condition to boot.
What it is, is a fascinating piece of furniture. To me, anyway.
It has a folding top, so you can open it up and presto! you have twice the surface. The top is not attached to the base. Instead, there’s a metal pin that goes into a hole in a block of wood, and as a result, the top kind of pivots unless it’s pushed up snug against a wall.
It has a drawer, in which I discovered long wood rods covered in dough and flour —rolling pins, essentially.
Below the drawer, there’s a board that can also be slid out and removed. I think it was used as the surface for rolling the dough, with a lip to catch on the table edge, but I’m not entirely sure.
For some reason that is unclear to me, the previous owners inscribed their name on it, inside, in pencil.
The whole village hauls their accumulated large garbage out to the curb for pick up. More significantly, a steady stream of Roma cruise the streets in Suzuki Swifts or with carts pulled by bedraggled ponies to collect anything of use and anything made of metal.
Um, no. Really no. Not unless the house were crumbling and unsalvageable — and it is nothing close to that.
Love, love, love!