House Records

It has been my sometime custom over the years, having been lucky enough to have lived in many meritorious houses, to keep a house book.  That is to say, something of a record of what the house has lived through during my tenancy.  It’s usually just a commonplace notebook, and I try to remember to jot down in it things that happen to the house and garden over the passing year, and also sometimes things that have happened to us.  I have done better at some times than others, better with some houses than others, but I have been pretty reliable in keeping account of the present two houses, the one in Point Roberts, WA, nd the other in Roberts Creek, B.C.

Because I am in B.C. now, what I have at hand is that house’s book, a book whose last empty pages are coming up.  (Is that why we are thinking of selling now?)  It begins on April 17, 1993 (although we moved up here in July of 1992): “Back after 5 weeks in L.A.  When I left on March 10th, there were two salmon berry flowers: one on the road, one in the meadow.  Now there are salmon berry flowers everywhere.”  I’m sorry to have to note that today, March 26, there’s not even a sign of a salmon berry bud, let alone a salmon berry flower, although the salmon berry plants, barren sticks, are still all around us.  

As I page through the book, that is the content that most attracts me right now: how things used to be in bloom well before the end of March.  Thus, in March of 1994 (a month or so after rocking and rolling through the big earthquake in L.A.), the forsythia, thimbleberries, vinca, and bluets were in bloom, though none of them is (yet) today.  In March of 1995, the cherry tree was in full blossom, as were the native bleeding heart flowers.  In March of 1996, the daffodils were all in bloom.  None of those are in bloom this March.  And on, year by year, there is a record of past springs coming earlier than in recent years.  It’s good to know this.  To know what we have lost.

And it’s good to review all the other news that is recorded in the house’s book: the children, grandchildren, and friends who came to visit; the deaths of  all four of our parents, the construction of new gardens, the introduction of new roofs, new decks: the stuff that happens when you are busy doing something else, as John Lennon, I think, said of life.

And also in the book, an occasional phrase or sentence that had caught my ear or my eye, like this one by Witter Bynner (probably from his translation of The Book of the Dao, but perhaps from The Jade Mountain):  “Spring is no help to a man bewildered.”    No Kidding!  At least some things never change.