Terri and I have a lot of people to thank. We’ve had so much support from near and far throughout this year, and we don’t know what we would have done without it.
Last week we started sending out progress photos in emails, but we don’t even have contact information for many of the people who came to our aid. So I’ll be posting those photos here, along with a lot more as time goes on, more than is practical to send in emails.
We were able to move back in a few days before Christmas, a year and a fews days since the night of the fire. The house isn’t done, but it’s close, and we can continue the work more easily and comfortably now that we’re back. The yard is still a total wreck, complete with dumpster in the front yard and debris littered about. We’ll get to that soon.
Meanwhile, the inside is amazing. We still mourn what was lost, but that gets easier every day. Easier still, because we’re so pleased with the results of all the hard work.
Here are some before and after photos. In some cases, even the before-fire before for reference.
Living Room two days before he fire
Living Room the day after the fire
Living Room now
Living Room. The fire uncovered a doorway we always suspected was there originally.
Same wall with the doorway restored.
Kitchen Window before the fire.
Kitchen Window today
I had just finished the renovation two months before the fire.
Same view today
The sunroom a few months before.
Sunroom today. The arched ceilings are gone, but it’s full of light again.
The floors got refinished Friday, so we had to stay out of the house all weekend. This finally made some time for a chore postponed for a year now – washing the Melonseed sails.
Jim Drake, a fine boatbuilder and fellow sailor in the Old Bay Club, got in touch shortly after the fire, so soon I think there was still steam rising from the snow. He asked what he could do to help.
The night of the fire, the fire marshal generously offered to take us into the house to retrieve anything of value. We were so numb we couldn’t think. He went in and pulled photos off the walls, and found Terri’s handmade jewelry box, black as ebony, and brought them to us. I could only think of one thing – my sails, stored in the basement where the fire started.
We went in by the basement door wearing headlamps, and waded through shin deep sooty water, still raining down from the floors above. By the light of the headlamps I could see gear and tools and wood bobbing around in the black pool. The shop looked like the hold of a sinking ship. We grabbed the sails rolled up in Tyvek, and carried them out into the yard.
In daylight the next morning, I could see that, miraculously, they had not been scorched, but were covered in soot. When I heard from Jim, maybe even that day, the only thing I could think of was this boatbuilder friend might be able to figure out how to clean them.
And he did. A short time later a box arrived from his sail loft, containing two pounds of special cleaning powder and a set of simple instructions. For a year now, the sails and the cleaner have been stored in Doug’s rented garage, waiting for me to attend to it. Besides being consumed with house construction, the prospect of trying to clean the sails, perhaps only to find them beyond saving, was enough to put me off. With move in day coming in less than a week, and the wet floors keeping other tasks at bay, seemed like it was now or never.
They soaked in a tub of hot water with the cleaning solution overnight, stirring with a soup ladle every few hours. This morning I pulled the plug. Trying to rinse them from outside the tub was a full contact sport, like wrestling a jellyfish. I finally gave up, stripped down, and just got in the shower with them. Which worked out well, but I will spare my gentle readers the photos of that particular step.
They hung from the rope swing out in the wind and the sun all day to dry. I must say, they look almost as good as new. Cleaner than they were before the fire. There are only a few faint smudges left, adding character. I’ll always remember where those came from.
Oh, and Terri’s jewelry box? Another friend, fine cabinet maker Todd Leback of Vaneri Studio, took on the task of restoring it and sent a photo. It looks like the original birdseye maple again.
Two more things to make our Christmas a lot more cheerful.
We made dinner and took it over to the house to have a Thanksgiving picnic amid the tools and fresh paint and sawdust. We’ve got lights and heat and flushing toilets. Everything else is gravy, so to speak.
Thankful for so many things this year, but especially all the friends and family who helped us through some really tough times. We fell in love with our little town all over again.
These are trees I planted around the house 25, 20, and 10 years ago, the first when the girls were starting elementary school. Some, like the willow, were rooted from branches. Some were transplanted from the woods as saplings. None were more than an inch around or six feet tall.
Now the tallest one is over thirty feet high.
Most will outlive me.
I think we’ll plant a Sycamore where the Silver Maple used to be. I’m still thinking long term, apparently.
Forty years ago, in my first semester of college, I bought some plants to furnish the room. The dorms were dim and dogeared, depressing. Plants were cheaper than chairs, so I picked some up at a campus sale, all in little 4″ pots. For a few bucks they brought a little life into the place. At least for a while. The room was so dark, most of them died by the end of the first year.
One, though, managed to hang on. An odd little thing, just a grey scaly bulb the size of a billiard ball, with skin like an elephant, half buried in the soil. A stout trunk tapered up from the bulb, topped with a pom-pom of grassy green leaves. It looked like something right out of Dr. Seuss. A botany major friend determined it was a ponytail palm. I became rather fond of it. Frond of it?
The next year I moved off campus and it came with me, suffering mightily for the rest of my college career – knocked over by inebriated housemates, dug up and defecated on by ill-behaved cats, neglected when I went away for holidays. Even stayed home alone the summer I went abroad. It survived all that, and eventually outgrew the original pot, earning a splurge on a new larger non-plastic container.
I left college, and the plant came with me.
Years went by and wherever I went the plant went, too. Cars and furniture and clothes and jobs got shed along the way, dead husks shucked off like snake skins, but after each purge the plant remained. If I dug through all the photos of my life over the past 40 years, this one odd thing would keep popping up in the background like a silent Forrest Gump:
In a cabin on the York River where I had my first wooden sailboat, sitting on the old grain scale that served for an end table.
In the apartment in downtown Atlanta just off Peachtree Street, where I squatted under a tree next to John Lee Hooker playing the blues in Piedmont Park, and saw R.E.M. in a bar in Athens for $5, which included a pitcher of beer.
On the iron balcony of a pink victorian in the historic district of Savannah, where church bells chimed on Sunday mornings and Spanish Moss collected on the railings, and finches twittered in the aviary I built for them that summer when the Challenger exploded with a teacher aboard.
In the basement of my grandmother’s house in Richmond, when Apple and Microsoft started marketing the first viable desktop computers, and the Berlin Wall came down.
There in the attic in Richmond when I logged onto the World Wide Web for the first time, and stayed up all night exchanging messages with people across the world over a dialup modem.
In the background, a little bigger now, when my daughters were born, and learned to walk and swim and ride a bike.
In Scottsville, where they played soccer and finished high school and went off to college themselves.
In the sunroom where Terri and I drank coffee and planned trips to the West Coast or the Low Country.
All the while that funny little plant kept going, eventually filling a large oriental porcelain pot the size of a bucket, standing in the corner so tall it brushed the 9 foot ceilings in our house.
Until the night of the fire.
A week after the fire.
When we walked through the house the next day, all the plants were wilted, black like everything else. That night it got down to 16 degrees. Though heat from the fire kept the whole house warm for a day, it dipped below freezing every night the following week. There was no power and no heat in the house. Everything froze.
Seven days after the fire, I gave Doug a tour of the damage. When we came to this plant – black and wilted, covered in soot –he said, you know, that’s a pretty big root ball, it might be OK, maybe you could save it?
So a few days later I took it out back, lopped off the stalk, and stuck it in the neighbor’s spare room with the other smokey things we hoped to save. A month after that, I brought it to the cottage, still bare and black, and set it near the window and watered it.
Two months after the fire.
A month later still, two months after the fire, I noticed a small lump on the stalk. Then, a few days later, a tiny spud of green broke through.
I tipped the pot over and let all the black sooty water drain out, added some fresh soil. A week later, another spud appeared, then another.
Now, there are several sprouts of green, and it seems this tough old plant refuses to die.
When I lived in Savannah, I discovered a remarkable native plant called “Resurrection Fern“. It spreads out along the top of big Live Oak limbs forming a fringe of little bonsai forests.
Resurrection Fern after a rain.
An epiphyte, it has no root system, since there’s no soil where it grows. It clings to the bark and survives in the humid southern air on nutrients in the dust and rain dripping down the limbs.
In periods between rains it turns grey and shrivels up like origami ashes, losing up to 97% of it’s moisture and going dormant. But it revives and turns vivid green again within hours after the first splash of rain. Most plants die after losing only 10% of their water, and don’t come back. These plants could remain dormant without water for over a century, and still revive.
Very impressive, these little ferns.
So I’m christening this tough and homely house plant of mine the Resurrection Palm.
Russell E. Train Africana Collection, Smithsonian Institution Libraries.
One hundred forty years ago on this day, in 1879, Henry Morton Stanley set out to explore the Congo for brutal King Leopold of Belgium, thereby opening central Africa to the ravages of colonialism and Arab slave traders, and thus became the inspiration of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Prior to that, he traveled up the Nile to its source to search for David Livingstone, whom he may not have actually greeted with “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Henry Morton Stanley was not even his real name.
Born in Wales, he was abandoned by his mother and never met his father (actual parentage undetermined). He grew up abused in a poor house until the age of 18, when he emigrated to the US by way of New Orleans. Walking off the ship looking for work, he was taken in by a storekeeper, and thereafter took the name of his adopted father.
He is perhaps the only person to have served during the Civil War in both the Confederate Army (fighting in the Battle of Shiloh), the Union Army, and the Union Navy. As a journalist, he traveled the American West, then organized an expedition to the Middle East where he was captured and imprisoned by the Ottoman Empire. But eventually talked his way out of jail.
His many expeditions, while successful, typically resulted in the death of most of the participants.
In later years in Britain, he served in Parliament, and was knighted shortly before his death in 1904.
