The Ravages of Time

At a social event the other day, I found myself in a conversation about the many abandoned houses in Point Roberts.  A local resident, who knows that I have made a series of abandoned house quilts based on these buildings, offered me her views on this matter.  “I think it’s just a shame that the County doesn’t require that these houses be torn down, don’t you?”

Well, since I definitely don’t think that and in fact have gone to considerable trouble to honor the houses in their current state and thereby to express my admiration, I was surely taken aback.  Not so far aback that I couldn’t express my disagreement, but still…

Like everybody, I find that there are things that seem so obvious that I can’t quite believe they aren’t obvious to everyone.  Before I made the house quilts, I understood that there were people who were trying to force their destruction because, as they said, they were ‘eyesores.’  But I actually (obviously naively) thought that in making the quilts I would in some way be showing them the beauty that was there.  And indeed, my critic (or, more accurately, the houses’ critic) went on to say that in making the quilts, I had of course made them beautiful but that was because I was an artist.  But, her look suggested, they are not beautiful; they are an eyesore.

My view, of course, is that all I did was reproduce what was there before me;  if she can’t see that the major difference is between life and fabric, between what actually exists and what I have the technical skill to reproduce.  Ah, well.  There you are.  People.

But it made me think once again about why I think the abandoned houses are so beautiful, why they grab my attention.  It's mostly a matter of contrast, I suppose.  First, of course, is our time's peculiar obsession with youth.  Not so much being young as pretending that we are young, whether it’s cosmetic dentistry or cosmetic surgery or the sudden abundance of strawberry blondes among women of a certain age.  The houses are not kept up, but if they were, we would not even notice them; they would just be another of the many unremarkable houses that line streets and roads.  It is their age and their agedness that draws me so to them, that makes them exceptional.  Like so few things we people touch, they are—or at least have finally become—exactly what they are.

Second, we like trendy things, new things.  ‘Can’t sell our house,’ a friend says, ‘because we don’t have granite counters in the kitchen.’  And how many millions of houses have there been that had no granite counters and that were beloved by the people who lived in them?  The abandoned houses surely don’t look new or trendy; they look old and ravaged.  They look like houses that have been around for awhile and have bravely survived the loss of the need they once served.

Third, we are afraid of growing old.  And the abandoned houses do it and they do it publicly.  Time to convene a death panel?  Or time to see what we can learn from them?  Certainly time to go visit them all again, at least all those that are still standing, and to take another round of photos for their autobiographies.