The Earl is Here!
This is a story about our house and our home
I was at my shop a couple of weeks before Christmas when I got a text from Adam that said “the daughter of the earl is here!”
I immediately understood what that meant, and felt glad about it.
We moved into this house 8.5 years ago. I had started looking at homes with a realtor nine months prior, right at the beginning of my relationship with Adam. It was our date days on Wednesdays. The realtor would pick us up on Wednesday mornings and we’d scramble into the car and go look at houses. We were young. I was a part time nanny, part time graduate school student, and starting my baby apothecary… all while falling in love.
The notion of “owning a home” was bizarre to me. Coming from New York, that never seemed like a possibility, but after a year and a half in Portland, it became apparent that if I was planning to stay longer than the original two year Portland-for-graduate-school-plan, getting a house would be a good idea. And I needed to do it before my mother retired.
I remember only one other home from all of those Wednesdays that still makes me feel like it could have been it. But this one. I remember seeing it listed on Redfin. A white ranch that was built in 1950. Only two owners, the current ones having been there only two years. I think from the photos that it was the parklike backyard that really got me. With a swimming pool. Adam and I were on a one week break from hanging out and talking when I stumbled across this listing, but I called the realtor anyway to see if we could go check it out.
Sometimes I think that it’s ironic after all those months of looking at homes together, it was the one week Adam wasn’t there that we walked into this one. After all, Adam always said that although he’s happy to check homes out with me, he would not have me making any decisions based on a notion that he may move in.
When we walked into this house it was one of the few times in my life that there was a full body yes. If I look back at photos, I don’t know why or how. There was dull dirty carpet throughout the house. Old furniture. Drapes on every window that were so old and worn that they were no longer white, but more of a creamy beige. The galley kitchen was bright yellow with a refrigerator blocking part of the doorway to the hall. The downstairs was dark and dingy and had melancholic faux wood paneling. The furnace room had these marvelous-to-me workbench built-ins which I immediately imagined would be a perfect apothecary workspace. Outside there was a grape ivy arched entry from the driveway to the backyard. To the left along the detached garage were the most fragrant vibrant hot pink roses I had ever seen. A kidney bean shaped in-ground pool surrounded by white aggregate. Behind it a large cherry tree shading the lawn. Along the back perimeter of the property behind the pool and cherry tree were tall thick evergreen hedges, with an even taller flagpole spiking out the center. Some garden beds to the side of the house and a somewhat dilapidated boat shack. It felt like a real house. A real home. With 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom still decked in marvelous-to-me iridescent pussy willow wallpaper.
This was the first and only time I submitted an offer on a house. I offered asking price which I was told was a risk because the market was competitive. When I got the call from the realtor a few days later saying I got the house, she also told me that something strange had happened. She was in Market of Choice in SW Portland when she got confirmation that they accepted my offer and when she looked up, Adam was in the store. So she got to tell him first. This felt like a good sign in multiple ways to me.
During the inspection, the inspector cautioned me that the original owner of the house must have been somewhat handy. “Cautioned” because being somewhat handy in the 1950’s and 1960’s and 1970’s and 1980’s didn’t add up to being to code, or even always safe. So there would be matters along the way to contend with. Speaking of the original owners of the house, I wanted to know everything about them. I found the obituaries of Earl and Vivian.
I couldn’t find much about Vivian, other than the fact that she was the one who planted all the roses. The roses that are now such an integral part of my product line. Her smile and countenance in her obituary photo was beautiful. Earl was a nice man who lived to be 100. He died on Christmas eve. He moved to Portland as a young child in the 1910’s and lived here his entire life. He served in the armed forces, and his obituary mentions his love for the love of his life (his wife of 64 years), for trains, and for the American flag. That explained the 20 foot flagpole in the backyard. In the following years, we’d learn snippets from the last remaining elder neighbors about how sweet Earl was. How he’d manually push his truck out of the driveway before starting it so as not to wake his wife. How he was everyone’s friend and was fondly known as “the Earl of the neighborhood.”
These snippets of information made me feel good about moving into the house and becoming the new steward of the property, though I wasn’t sure how they’d feel about us being queer- the mentions of the flag and military and religion, and all. But when we did the initial clearing on moving day, Adam and myself both felt that they would be ok with it and like us being good people who hoped to make this house a home.
Adam did move in with me a few short months later. When I think through the last 8.5 years of constant projects, various housemates, plants that started as tiny houseplants that are now lovingly are house jungle, the walls that have come down, the walls that have gone up, the paint colors that have changed, the carpets that have been removed, the tiles that have been added, the basement that is now a beautiful living space, the pool deck that you can now walk on without hurting your feet, the electrical wiring that is now safer, the vintage camper that now sits where the boat shed sat, the oasis that first lured me in outside that is even more of an oasis now. We have tended-to and fully poured ourselves into this place.
The summer before Covid, our friend was staying at our house while we were both at work. We got a text that said “I just met a nice elder dyke named Megan* who stopped to tell me she grew up in your house!” My response was “Nu uhhhhh. Did you get her info? Cuz that’s literally the best news.” Our friend didn’t get her info but said she would stop by again. And that she lives in town and was a firefighter.
That was August of 2019, almost exactly four years after we moved into the house and we have waited and waited for this person to come back. We felt some kind of comfort knowing the original owners had a queer child. Like the torch passing to us was now fully acceptable.
We speak often about how much energy we put into our living spaces. It’s almost like an obsession. There’s a magnetic pull to make this place the best it can be for us and for everyone who visits. It’s so much more than a house and a backyard. And yet…especially lately…the macro questions of the brevity of life and the privilege to even have a place to call home and the violence with which homes are sometimes made… it’s like “what is even the point of it all?”
And now we’re back to a few weeks ago when I got the text from Adam that said “the daughter of the earl is here!” I knew what that meant and it made me glad.
Earl and Vivian’s daughter and her wife didn’t even knock on the door. They stopped outside in their car and were just looking at the house when Adam noticed them. He said hello and when one of them said she grew up here, Adam said “we’ve been waiting for you! Want to come in and see what we’ve done?” They said “yes!” So Adam showed them around the house. She told him the room that is now his office was her bedroom. She was one of five children in this small three bedroom house. She told him it was her mother had installed the iridescent pussy willow wallpaper in the bathroom. The wallpaper we loved so much, we kept one wall of it when we remodeled that room. She told him that her father was always tinkering with things and that he did a lot of work himself. Adam didn’t have the heart to tell her that well… we noticed. When she saw that the cherry tree was gone, Adam told her how I had cried and cried and hugged the tree for hours the day it had to go. I dream of the cherry tree in my own childhood backyard often, and miss both these trees desperately. She asked if we ever need to take the tree from the front yard down, if we would consider saving some pieces for her. Of course we would.
As Adam was finishing the tour, Megan said “oh my goodness it’s the same doorknob.” When they were young, Megan was streaking through the backyard from the pool, and her older sister chased her back inside. She ran into the doorknob of that door between the kitchen and the mudroom. That same door that we painted white and whose window we look outside through, countless times a day.
So I guess this is a story about our house. Which was her house. And will likely be someone else’s house one day. A tender ode to the sweet fleeting moments of our lives and the spaces we get to inhabit and cherish and care for. The resonance of all of it.
*daughter’s name changed for this essay