Bill
When I moved from Jamaica Plain to Hyde Park in June of 1953, our new house was lacking in some ways. Both the cellar and the attic were unfinished. The desire to make our house into a home was there from the beginning. My father wanted to transform the attic into second floor bedrooms. Down the cellar, the plans called for a finished room on one side with a workshop, laundry area and storage space on the other. There was no thought of construction those first few days of living in our new house. All we wanted was to stock the kitchen, put a couch and TV in the living room and set up the beds so we had a place to sleep. This was easy enough to accomplish in the finished first floor. It was more difficult upstairs in the attic space where my two brothers and I were sleeping.
Up there the only thing that gave the space any sense of being a room was the planking on the floor. Not shiny new maple but rough hewn planks my father and grandfather had put up there in the weeks before we moved so there’d be a floor to walk on. There were no finished walls and no ceiling, just the slope of the roof and the studs which supported it. That’s where our beds went, two on one side for my younger brother and me, and one on the other for Ralph, my older brother. It was definitely rustic but also charming with that new wood smell lingering for a couple of months as the summer turned to fall.
My brother Lawrence and I had the bigger space while my older brother had the smaller space with the stairway acting as a divider. It took a couple of years but slowly the attic changed from an empty unadorned space to a comfortable living area with real floors, walls and ceilings.
I didn’t mind the time spent up there during the transition. I never had my own room so I didn’t know what I was missing. Ralph being older probably cared about privacy more than I did. It was light years from the situation in Jamaica Plain where all four of us, I include my poor sister Mildred, shared the large front room. The attic room became more than just a place to sleep; it was a place in which to play. It was a place I read, a place I studied. Sometimes I’d go up there just to look out the window.
There were two windows, casement type, one each on opposite ends of the attic. You’d crank them open. Set on hinges, the windows opened outward so you could open them as much as you wanted, a crack or all the way. The idea was to slant them in such a way so that the glass surface redirected a breeze into the room on hot days. That may have been the theory but in summer no amount of breeze did much to lower the temperature of our rooms under the roof. It was hot up there. Trying to sleep was difficult. I remember a picture in Life magazine of kids in New York sleeping out on fire escapes during oppressive nights and thinking how great that would be. On the hottest nights up in the attic I was always turning my pillow over looking for the cool spot.
At least the windows upstairs, ineffective as they were in cooling that space, were not a danger to life and limb. The ones downstairs that opened onto the driveway were a different story. Most people expect a window to rise up, not extend out, so anyone walking up the driveway to the back stairs would quickly discover such a window’s major flaw when they whacked against it. We quickly learned those windows could only be opened a few inches. No chance of a breeze coming into my sister’s room. The rest of the windows were more benign, windows that opened onto the front lawn from the living room, more in my parents’ bedroom, a couple in the kitchen, one over the sink looking out into the backyard, and one in the bathroom. There was no danger of anyone running into them.
To me the windows in our house invoked the seasons. When the windows were open it was summer; when they were closed it was winter. I always thought of a winter house as an insular house, one cut off from the world outside. In summer, with the windows open, all the sounds from outside permeated the inside, at times charging it with energy, the sounds of kids playing noisily on Prospect Street, or imbuing the house with atmosphere, the sounds of high breezes caught in the tops of the trees from all around the house. In winter you could look out into the snow-filled backyard. I especially liked doing that from my parents’ cozy bedroom. No matter how cold it was outside, the window protected me from any gusty swirls of snow that might sweep across the yard against the glass my face was pressed up to.
When it was warm my mother would open the windows in the morning to get some cooler air, shut them as the heat of the day increased, adjusting them depending on conditions. There were moments too when we were all running around trying to close them when a sudden downpour resulted from a passing thunderstorm. Not that easy to crank windows shut when speed was of the essence. Then they had to be washed. My mother kept the inside clean. The outside required a large brush and a bucket of soapy water. Sometimes, skipping the soap, my father would spray forceful water against them using the hose. I’d try to follow him from the inside of the house so I could press my face against the window loving how abstract the world looked through the slippery blur of water. And not getting the least bit wet!
I liked looking out the upstairs windows because they gave you a view from high up, one view down to our driveway, the other a look down Prospect Street to Fairmount Avenue. It dovetailed with my love in Jamaica Plain of the view from high up on walls, or climbing up outside stairs. The windows never changed in all the years I lived there. They, like the fireplace in the living room and the cement walls in the cellar work space, remained a constant even as other parts of the house underwent modifications.
As important as it was to my father to fix up the inside of the house, it was the backyard that was of immediate concern. It was mud when we first moved in. It required some leveling, some smoothing out and then the long-term application of grass seed. The growing of grass in the back was never a sure thing. There were areas of sun and, under the trees, areas of shade. When we had our dog Laddie for a few years, it was under the trees where he had his dog run, another factor as to why there were patches of dirt there. Drainage was another issue. Prospect Street sloped down, as did the backyards. When it rained some of the yard of the house next to us would end up in our yard. Keeping the lawn looking good under these conditions was taxing. Then there were the ants.
If anything demonstrated we were now living in the country, it was the prevalence of bugs. I am not a bug person. Spiders, things buzzing around you, mosquitoes trying to drain your blood, none of it good. The ants were most problematic. The red ants bit us, and the black ants got into the house.
From the first day, based on the warnings of my parents and my own experience with bugs, I was wary of the red ants. Not that it made any difference. Whether they caught on to my clothing while I was in the woods or climbed up my leg while I was playing in the back yard, they always managed to get me. Nasty creatures with nasty bites. One time I had a series of bites from my stomach all the way up to my chest, little red welts in a neat row. The bites would sting, then turn red and then itch. After discovering an ant had dined on you, you then had to find it so it wouldn’t bite again. Their size made that difficult. After the first bite was made obvious through pain, the desperate search would begin to find the ant and kill it, or at least flick it back to the ground. There was nothing worse than getting a bite, then another, and another and not being able to find where the damn biter was lurking. Shirts would fly off, kids would start crying, other kids would look to see where the ant was. You could always tell if a kid had been attacked from the white blots of calamine lotion on their skin. I don’t know if calamine was really effective as pain relief but it was cool and soothing. Most of the time that was all that really mattered.
To deal with the ants that first summer my father sprayed with Chlordane, a toxic pesticide that has since been banned. My father was aware of the hazards of Chlordane before they became widely known but continued to use it as judiciously as he could figuring he had to do something to deal with the ants. I remember seeing bottles of Chlordane in the cellar. It was an amber-colored liquid you would mix with water in a sprayer to apply. Every once in a while I’d open a bottle to smell it. It had this not unpleasant aromatic odor. I did this even after my father had drawn a skull and crossbones on the bottle indicating this was poison, nothing to mess with.
As I said, my father was careful in his use of Chlordane. There were kids playing in the yard, dogs running around. It took a while but the presence of ants seemed to diminish, at least in the yard. No one was spraying in the woods behind the house and that is where I was most at risk for bites. It’s interesting to realize that calamine and Chlordane have very similar sounds, one to sooth, one to eradicate, both utilized as best as we knew how in those years before Silent Spring to cope with those creatures on whose land our house had been built.
Boxwood hedges eventually were planted around the front yard, along part of the driveway and then about half way down on the west side of the house. The hedges did well over the years, their hardiness and no fuss maintenance contributing to a look of well-kept containment at the front of our house. Curb appeal. As I got older one of my jobs would be to cut them. I’d use a large pair of hedge trimmers. The clippers were clumsy, like a pair of giant shears, making it difficult to transform random shoots of hedge sticking out all over into the crisp box-like effect you wanted to end with. By the time we bought electric trimmers I was long out of the house but, still, I did a pretty good job trimming by hand.
There was sometimes more than hedge to deal with. Yellow jackets loved to build their nests among the tangle of the branches and leaves. Because of that same tangle I wouldn’t notice until it was too late. Once I reached in to pick off a few loose shoots when a swarm of annoyed hornets flew out. I was annoyed too. I screamed, dropped the clippers and tore off into the back yard. The hedges stayed untrimmed that afternoon until my father got home to deal with it. Starting out again the next morning, the smell of insecticide still heavy in the air, I was more than cautious as I resumed trimming. I was still jittery. Any buzzing sound would get me running so it took a while to finish the job.
For some reason the hedges stopped about where the side of the house ended. From the end of the hedge to the woods my father built a picket fence. I helped him dig the posts for it. Before each post went in the ground he’d dip the end in a foamy brown liquid, wood preservative. “Any thing that goes in the ground,” he told me, “is going to rot. So this will help for a while.”
My father was very good with his hands. Not only could he build things, he built them well. I was his helper for many of those renovation projects even if it mostly came down to handing him tools and holding the end of the board he was cutting. One thing I remember about the fence was measuring it all out first. Not only did my father want it straight, it also ran down a slope which meant some adjustment with the posts. I began to realize even a relatively simple job like installing a picket fence required preplanning and even envisioning what it would look like before it was built.
Once the posts were in, we added the two by four cross pieces that the pickets would be nailed to. When my father nailed in the pickets, and he used a hammer, this long before nail guns, he would place a loose picket next to one that had been nailed to get the exact space he wanted between each picket. “So that’s why each picket looks equally apart from the next one,” I marveled.
When it was done it looked good. I liked having the yard contained like this. Now a loose ball wouldn’t roll all the way down into the neighbors’ yards. Still the fence had a raw look. It needed paint.
I painted that fence every couple of summers during the years I lived on Prospect Street. The first job was to clean it from accumulated dirt and leaves and peeling paint since the last time it had been painted I used a wire brush and a putty knife. I’d begin with enthusiasm but after an hour or so of scrapping and brushing I’d be hot and tired and bored. I’d be more careless as I worked my way down to the woods figuring anything I missed I’d just cover with extra paint.
The fence was the same color as the house, a blue green. Painting the flat pickets on the neighbor’s side was easy. The tedious work began on our side of the fence. Not only the back side of the pickets but the narrow edges and the posts. I didn’t mind most of it. “Slop the paint on,” were my father’s instructions. I tried to do as he suggested but I discovered I didn’t like dripping paint. So I developed a style of clumsy finesse. I’d began work up by the hedges and slowly moved down toward the woods, every day a few pickets closer. “When I reach the woods.” I told myself, “I’ll be done.”
Sometime in July. A warm afternoon, quiet in the neighborhood. My lunch break has come and gone. The entire afternoon looms in front of me. I am sitting on a small stool, paint can next to me, leaning in, the sun broken up into patches of shade and light by the huge beech tree in the neighbor’s back yard. A dog barks somewhere, a couple of cars go by. I finish another section. I stand up, stretch. Not too much time to rest. I can’t let the brush dry out. I move the stool, work on a post. There’s movement. A swarm of black carpenter ants come pouring out, some falling into the paint can. I swat at them with the brush, their wet blue bodies in panicked disarray. I keep working, poking the brush into the area where the ants had just been. Our dog, Laddie, comes over, sniffs around. I can’t pet him or he’ll be blue as well.
Late in the afternoon I walk across the yard to where our garden is, look back to survey the fence. The freshly painted part looks good, clean-looking, newly bright in the sun. A breeze comes up. Tomorrow I want to have this finished.
Rooms in the cellar are called various things: finished, party rooms, family room, rec room, a game room, even whoopie rooms. To me it was just “the cellar room.”
It took some work to turn it into a room. When we moved to Hyde Park the cellar was unfinished, cement floor, cement walls, a couple of small windows, a couple of steel posts holding up the beams that held up the house. The day we moved, my younger brother played with his cars on the cement floor down there while our stuff was transferred from truck to house. In the summer it was always nice to go down the cellar where it was cool if a bit damp.
On the cellar room, as with all the house projects, I helped my father more than anyone else. My younger brother was too little, my older brother had no interest, he’d rather be out. My sister was working by that time and, besides, it wasn’t a “girl” thing to do. That left me. I didn’t mind even though there were times I had no idea what I was doing. I was clumsy with tools, not that good with my hands. At times my father could be impatient with me. But mostly it was fine. I liked watching a particular project evolve. The cellar room went from an unfinished basement to an enclosed space with shelves, a bench, a bar, a record changer, lighting and storage. An ordinary cellar transformed.
I don’t recall all the technical details involved in building the room. I was impressed that my father did. He always seemed to have a solution for a problem, or a technique to accomplish a task. The first thing we did was drill into the concrete floors to attach the framing. We didn’t have a cordless drill or carbide tips that I know off, just a heavy drill you plugged in the wall. My father had a key device that engaged teeth on top of the drill. He’d turn the key one way, the top of the drill chuck the opposite way, to remove one drill bit and add another. Then he’d tighten the key the other way to make sure the bit would not come loose. I tried it a few times without a lot of success. The key to remove the bit was small. I had trouble grasping it. I also found it confusing which way to turn it. I kept tightening the drill bit when I should have been loosening it. The key would keep slipping every time I tried it. It seemed so easy when my father did it.
I didn’t do any actual drilling. I was a pusher. While my father drilled, I’d push as hard as I could on his arm. With my father in front of me I couldn’t see what was going on. I just heard a loud whirring sound as the drill penetrated into the hard concrete and saw a smoky dust settling on the floor. I don’t think we wore safety glasses or wore dust masks. Every few minutes my father would stop to let us rest. In his tool box he had a little rubber bulb which he would use to squeeze air into the hole to blow out the concrete dust that had accumulated. Of course, that only added more dust to the air.
It was hard work. I got tired quickly. Probably cranky. It was a lot easier drilling into the wooden two by fours that would be bolted to the floor to serve as framing for the walls. There was attention to detail required. My father framed around the cellar window and also for a bench that was just below the window. Long after the room was finished, I liked to open up the bench to see the original concrete floor remembering the effort required to drill into it.
Later, when we began work on the attic room, it was done in stages over several years. Work on the cellar room continued unabated, in the evening, on weekends, until it was completed. One Saturday my father and I went to a lumberyard to order material for the walls. Tongue and groove knotty pine. I loved it. The white/yellow color, the woody smell, all those knots. Knotty pine was cheap, abundant and easy to work with. It also evoked early American colonial decor. In picking out the boards my father told me he was avoiding any that had knot holes that were missing or loose, and boards that were warped. I was learning a lot.
Helping my father saw the boards was easier than helping him force that drill into the concrete. He had a couple of beat up wooden sawhorses which supported the boards when he cut them. More than anything else, sawhorses standing on a cellar floor always evoke memories of this project. He’d be in the middle between the two sawhorses; I’d be at one end holding the board while he cut it. No power tools. My father used a typical carpenter’s saw, a cross cut. After measuring and drawing a pencil line across the board, he’d bring the saw up, bite the edge of the board slightly and then begin the cut. “Let the saw do the work,” he’d always say. When I would try it the saw would oppose me, bend as I tried to push it forward or even stop in the middle of the cut. “Do the work,” I’d admonish the saw but I never quite got the hang of it.
Besides I wasn’t the sawer, I was the holder. I liked the gleam of the saw as it flowed back and forth. In my father’s hands it was clean, easy, effortless work. As he finished the cut I’d pull the board out slightly so the cut would end neatly without a clutter of splinters at the end. I took some pride in trying to do this right. I would get nervous though if it were a short cut and my fingers were too close to the saw. I didn’t like that ripping sound, or the vibration. What if the saw slipped, I wondered.
I did like the sawdust. And there was a lot of it. Pine sawdust, light, fragrant, almost fluffy. I’d always have it on my fingers as the saw tore through the boards. And on my pants and shoes, even in my hair. Probably in my lungs as well. Luckily it was a natural product.
I learned there were other tools as important as a drill and a saw. To make the ends of the boards smoother my father would use a plane. This was a tool with an adjustable blade to cut across the end grain of wood. Like the saw, when my father used the plane it looked easy. When I tried it, the plane would fight back, become aggressive in my grip; I’d end up making the end of the board rougher than smoother. But my father liked me to try. “That’s how you learn,” he’d say.
He also used a level, a tool to ensure everything was straight, or plumb. The level was fun which meant I didn’t have to fight it to use it. Inside the wood part was a vial of liquid. “When the bubble of air inside the liquid is between the two lines, then you know what you’re working on is straight,” explained my father. This was like magic. We’d place the level against the board. If the board wasn’t level, the bubble would roll off to one end; make a slight adjustment and the bubble would be back in the middle. I used to put the level on my arm just above my hand trying to keep the bubble in the middle by moving my arm one way or another. More fun than trying to balance a saw on your finger. I did that too, once or twice, before realizing it was a good way to cut yourself.
Another tool we used to determine everything was on center was a plumb bob. This metal object was shaped like a cone, large on one end where the string was attached, tapering to a point on the other. To me it looked like a large brass bullet. My father would fix the string at the point to be plumbed and then allow the weight, or bob, to swing freely. When it stopped, the point of the bob would be exactly below the point at which the string was attached above. Often times I’d be down on the floor as my father held the bob up by the ceiling. Almost mesmerized, I’d watch as the plumb slowly swayed back and forth, moving slower and slower. “It’s stopped,” I’d yell out. At this point the bob was pointing to the center of the earth. But I was too young to think on such a scale. I was just glad I could be a help to my father.
My favorite of these small tools was the nail set. This looked like a giant nail. In fact you’d tap it at one end with a hammer. But the other more narrow end was designed to be placed against a nail that had already been hammered into a board. “We don’t want to dent the boards,”my father would say. He liked precise work, not sloppy. To avoid hammer marks on our soft knotty pine walls he’d bang a nail in until the end was just above the surface of the board. He’d finish with a few taps on the nail set so the nail would end up flush to the board. “That is so easy,” I’d think. Except when I tried it. I’m sure there are a couple of puncture marks still there on a few of the boards on the wall where the nail set slipped off the end of the nail nicking the board.
Many of the tools we used to build the cellar room were my grandfather’s, my father’s father. My father liked continuing the old traditions of hand work. He liked using the very tools his father used. “Someday you’ll make something with these tools,” he used to tell me. I still have the small wooden level, the same one we used to make the cellar room, the same one my grandfather used so many years before that. Some of the old traditions remain.
The quality of any job is in the details is something my father would often say. It was one thing nailing knotty pine boards up against a wall; something else to make special cuts for a corner or a bevel. It was necessary to cut a circle in a couple of the boards for the aluminum wall sconces, lights that were supported by the wall without a pole or a base as you might find in a lamp. My father was an electrician so all the electric rough-in was done prior to our putting up the walls. This meant a circular cut in a knotty pine board for a wall light had to precisely line up with the electric box on the wall the sconce would be attached to. Once he had that figured out we’d lay the board down on the horses and drill a hole in the middle of our penciled circle. Using a small jig saw we’d cut from the hole to the edge of the pencil circle and continue that way until we had enough space to saw in a circle to make the final opening. It was fun to do these special cuts. I always hoped when we were finished everything lined up. But, not being This Old House, sometimes they didn’t. Some times my father would lose his patience.
Once my little brother and I were helping him with the framing for a bench and storage area that was going under the cellar window. One of the two by fours suddenly snapped. Was I holding it wrong? Did I apply too much pressure? Don’t know. My father sent us all upstairs. He wasn’t so much angry as frustrated. A short time later he called me and I was back down there assisting again.
In the corner we had several boxes of ceiling tiles. I was admonished to be careful of them. They were soft, cushiony, easily broken. My job was to hand them up to my father who stood on a stepladder. Installing the floor was much crazier. Also in boxes, much heavier than the ceiling tiles, were stacks of floor tiles. Not soft, or even pliable, these ceramic tiles required special handling before they could be set on the floor. The prep involved a hot oven. Crazy.
Everyone was involved the night we put the floor in. My mother taking the warm, now pliable, tiles out of the oven, handing them to someone by the door who would hand them off again before they reached my father who was on his knees setting them in place. It was a bucket brigade with warm tiles instead of sloshing pails of water. My mother did not like commotion so the disruption to her kitchen during this process could not have been easy.
I liked the new floor, black tile with just a little bit of silvery thread decoration, and so much nicer to walk on than the hard, cold concrete. It contrasted nicely with the white of the tile above, earth and sky with the knotty pine as trees in a forest. That’s how I’d think of the room sometimes, a hidden, cozy abode. From the very beginning I considered the cellar room my own special place.
With the main elements complete, we now worked on the details which would smooth out the room’s rough edges, add some style and make the room a cohesive whole. Molding was one. Baseboard and quarter round for floor and ceiling, and woodgrain millwork for details like the stairs heading up to the kitchen. Here is where the nail set played a big role. The molding was delicate so a quick few strikes of the hammer drove in the nails while a few taps of the nail set finished the job. I even got to do some.
The room had a record changer, and a bar as well. My father’s old 78 records were stored under the bench by the window. The bench as well as the bar stools were topped with soft foam over which my father had stretched red plastic held on with upholstery tacks. For that job I had to hold a section of the plastic tight so the tacks could be tapped in. My father didn’t have enough hands to do the job all by himself. I mention the bar and record player and the other details of the room as a sort of preview for a future blog. After an initial party or two, and several Christmases toward the end of the 50s, the room was pretty much abandoned for my own use. All through junior and high school it’s where I did homework, had friends over, watched TV, listened to music. It was a sort of refuge about which I’ll have more to say.
The one party I remember took place a couple of months after the room was completed. It was November of 1956. I remember the date for the same reason I remember details of the party. Photographs. About 15 of them. Black and white, now curling at the edges, with that date on the back.
Everyone looks so young. The party was attended mostly by people from my mother’s side of the family. Aunts and uncles, my grandmother and grandfather from Jamaica Plain. My sister Mildred was there as well with a couple of her friends, friends she had known since childhood from JP, along with their boyfriends (Husbands by then?). There is a nice picture of them on the stairs.
Amidst the various groups sitting on the benches and gathered around the bar and the couples dancing, all with drinks in their hands, even those dancing, are the various elements of the room: the knotty pine, the curve of the top of the bar, the light sconces, the shelf in the corner, the detailing around the stairs. All those things I held boards for, selected tools for, even used tools for, are there in the background of the photographs. My father built the room but I worked with him as I would in many other endeavors over the years. The cellar room is still in the house on Prospect Street to this day, the wood darker, a crack or two in the flooring, but essentially the same, a testament to the skill and craftsmanship of my father and his little helper.
If you looked at our house during any early spring in the 50’s you’d see the driveway littered with long wooden planks. During March the snow and ice melted. The driveway was dirt. Combine the two and you have mud season. At times the car would sink up to its hubcaps in the mud. Opening the door you had to be aware of where the wooden plank was so you’d step on it and not into the mud. This must have driven my mother crazy since she was always admonishing us to take our shoes off so we wouldn’t track mud onto her floors. I don't remember I ever did. Instead I'd stamp my shoes on the porch. I can't imagine that working very well with wet mud. My poor mother.
Mud season wasn’t the only problem. Every time it rained we’d track mud into the house. Even the snow was muddy. My father’s vacation was usually in August, a relatively dry month. It was time to pave the driveway before the next mud season. First we framed the driveway with wooden forms. Then within that frame we had to get rid of all the loose dirt. As I found out it’s not easy using a heavy pointed shovel to dig up hard packed gravel. I did my best but this was serious work. I remember we had the deepest hole, maybe 4 to 5 feet, by the back stairs and the cellar window. We had had a few floods of heavy rain water coming into the cellar room from that window so my father wanted a deep enough hole to encourage as much drainage as possible. We used bags of sand to fill those excavations to prevent any future flooding.
With the loose dirt removed and the sand in place, the day arrived for the driveway to be paved. It was Saturday. I was very excited. My father was not doing an asphalt driveway so there wouldn’t be any bubbling tar containers, something my friends and I loved watching in Jamaica Plain. Our driveway was going to be cement, which meant there was going to be a cement mixer truck coming to our house. How great was that.
The morning of the pour, I am out in the driveway in old pants and a tattered shirt, waiting for the truck. It’s overcast, a bit cool this morning in August. My father is hoping it won’t rain, especially before the driveway can set. We hear the truck before we can see it. How did this heavy vehicle make it up Fairmount Hill, I wonder?
The enormous truck begins to maneuver on our narrow street to back into the driveway. Hoses are pulled out, attached to the water spigot in front of house. Then the chutes start to come off the truck, are assembled and pushed into place. All this time the enormous drum on the back of the truck has been rotating to keep the cement from hardening. My father is telling me cement is measured by the yard. Before he ordered the cement he had to figure out the depth, the width and length of the pour to estimate how much concrete to order. Once again I am very impressed by the depth, width and length of his knowledge.
The noise is amazing. The truck’s engine, the roll of the drum, and now the heavy slosh as the concrete begins to gush out of the truck and down the chute. Some of it slops over onto the dirt but most of it flows like cold lava down to the end of the driveway where one of the workers moves the chute back and forth so each area gets the right amount of the mixture.
It’s a fast process. Still overcast but no rain. More concrete slurry slides down the chute. Guys with shovels are moving it around. Considering cement is a solid, I love how liquid it all is and how in a few days we’ll be able to walk on it. But there’s a lot of work still to be done. Leveling, troweling, finishing. Water is turned on as one of the workers begins to wash wet concrete off the chutes and the back of truck. My old clothes are spotted with grey specks, concrete bits. My father holds out the hose so I can rinse my hands under the water to prevent any of the concrete from hardening on them. Some of the neighbor kids hang around to watch.
Later, when the truck has left, my father and I walk around the other side of the house to get to the back of the kitchen stairs. Just by the in-ground garbage pail, my father uses his pocket knife to etch his initials and the date into the still wet concrete. The cement quivers slightly as he does this.
It takes a few days but soon the car is parked on the slab, the boards are gone and our house no longer looks, as my father used to say, like a place from Tobacco Road.
The attic space was the last bit of our house to become a home. To me, though, sleeping up there, playing up there, living up there, it was already quite home-like long before it received its knotty pine walls, Homasote ceiling, and pine flooring.
The attic was turned into rooms over several summers. I have to say I did like it once the ceiling was up. Before that there were bats of insulation tacked up under the roof between the rafters but it was always falling off. We’d re-tack it and tape it and push it back in between the boards. Nothing helped. After a while it would be falling down again especially over my bed. My father used Homasote to finally solve this problem. These were sheets of cellulose-based fiber wall board made from compressed paper. They were light but a bit clumsy trying to maneuver them as we put them in place.
Knotty pine walls came later. It was the cellar all over again with sawhorses, saw dust, nail sets and marking pencils. This time I was older and, hopefully, more skilled in my assistance duties. Like the cellar, it was the finishing touches that turned the upstairs from a space into a room. There was a built-in closet on one side that led back to eaves, spaces under the roof for storage. These were good places to hide during games or just a place to go when you wanted some privacy. We also had shelves on one side and a smaller door on the other which led to more space under the opposite roof.
I was glad the walls and ceilings were finally up; they made the room neater, cleaner, more compact. It was a different story when the floors went in. The wide planks we had been walking on since we moved in were rough but not splintery. Best of all was that some of them were loose. You could open them up to hide things under the floor. When my younger brother and I played with our cars and trucks, many times we’d store “drums of high explosives”, also known as the worn-out batteries we’d get when flashlights needed new ones, under the floor. Yes, stored very carefully. But they always managed to blow up sometime during the game. So, I didn’t mind the floors. I was used to them. But to complete the room we needed a new floor.
To get the floor boards up to the room my father would hand them to me from down in the driveway. I’d be up in the attic window, grab an end and carefully maneuver it through the narrow opening. This must have taken a while. Maybe we tied four or five boards together and passed them up as bundles.
The floor laying operation was like clockwork. We’d measure, cut and then place a board adjacent to the previous one. They were tongue and grooved so, first, using a block of wood, we’d tap the board into the groove of the adjacent one. One tap at one end, one tap at the other, and a tap or two in the center. Then we’d nail into the groove on the open side of the board. Since the tongue of another board had to fit into this groove, we had to make sure the nails were flush. This required my old friend, the nail set. I’m fourteen now so my skill at some of these tasks has progressed from clumsy to not too bad at all. The floor goes in pretty quickly. Tap, tap, tap. Next board.
The floor went down during a week in August of 1959. I remember this because during an afternoon break I had come down to get the mail. There curled in the two prongs below the mail box that held the magazines was the new issue of Life. Inside was a spectacular photo essay on a giant construction boom going on in New York City, “A Newer New York”. Men scrambling up scaffolding, balanced on cranes, construction equipment reflected in the glass walls of skyscrapers, an enormous chunk of brick wall toppling to the ground during a demolition. The color photographs were full of action, of revitalization, of dynamic change. I loved looking at them. These were aspects of the world not available on our small screen black and white television. Magazines were still prime and important. I’m also thinking, we’re building too. My father and I. Upstairs. Finishing the attic. Making things better. Newer. I feel part of a much bigger picture. But it’s a small, ordinary moment I remember most vividly that August afternoon.
It’s hot, the heat trapped upstairs as we work. My father has always been affected by the heat. His hands are sweaty as he grips the hammer as I hand him the nail set. We need a late afternoon break.
“These are the dog days of summer,” he would tell me, a description of hot, sultry summer days associated with the rising of Sirius, the dog star, in the constellation Canis Major. I didn’t know too much about that. It was another saying my father had that made more sense to me. “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” On this day it was both hot and humid with not a hint of breeze to put your face into.
We walk into the backyard. In the corner of the patio is the hose, curled up like a stack of deflated bicycle tires. My father grabs the open end, tightens the nozzle and begins to drag it into the middle of the back yard. “Turn on the faucet,” he tells me. The spigot is on the back of the house just above the concrete foundation. I turn it on full. My father lets some of the water flow from the hose until it’s cool. Then he turns the hose up to the roof. In a tight little arc the water strikes the very top of the roof and begins to flow down, dripping in cascades off the edge onto the patio below.
“This way we can cool the attic before we go up there again,” he says. As the water splatters against the asphalt shingles, clouds of steam begin to rise. Waves of heat distort the fine droplets of water. At one end of the roof there appears a tiny rainbow.
In his film, Stardust Memories, Woody Allen confronts, as best he can, the big issues: life’s meaning, happiness in an insecure world, maintaining relationships. Toward the end of the film, he and his girlfriend are in his apartment “just sort of sitting around” as he puts it. It’s spring, a Sunday. The woman, Dorrie, is lying on the floor reading through the newspaper. “For one brief moment everything just seemed to come together perfectly,” Allen narrates. “I felt happy, almost indestructible in a way.”
That’s how I felt that August afternoon standing in the backyard, the sun splaying through the giant beech in the neighbor’s yard, the indelible heat pressing against my body, the sky, a summer sky, blue and perfect. My father, in his white undershirt and gray pants, standing in the middle of the yard slowly moving the hose back and forth over the roof.
For just this brief moment I am where I should be. Fourteen years-old, starting high school in a few weeks. Confident, capable, content. Almost indestructible in a way.
And then my father and I go back upstairs and finish the floor.
