HOUSE ON A HILL

I first saw the house in a picture, before my husband and I went to visit it, and I thought it was sweet and beautiful; when I stepped out of the car and was standing in front of the house, I thought it was perfect.  I had seen a lot of houses by then – many in pictures and one in person, and it was a very serious business, really being inside a house and imagining that we lived there and examining its texture and its potential to be more than an imagining, and yet looking also at character.  This house, the one I thought was perfect, had exactly the kind of character that I wanted in a house.  I did not know it at first, but the house also had a tragic flaw.

We walked through the house, opening closets and cupboards and stepping inside and examining every space that would fit us.  For a long time it was still perfect.  We went downstairs and found a few things that needed fixing.  Then we saw the crack, enormous, “like an earthquake,” and our advice-giver (also called a real estate agent) said it was the worst she’d ever seen.

It wasn’t too hard to ferret out the reason.  Once we knew, the misery of the house was quite apparent, its sufferings no more than you’d expect from something built precariously into the slope of a hill.  The house couldn’t stay that way.  Ninety years it had been wilting down the hill, every part of it gently sagging, the foundation cracking under the strain of trying to prevent an inevitable fate.

I wonder about the person who built it.  He might simply have been a risk-taker, or perhaps a man with nothing to lose.  Was there a woman who helped him dream it up, or was she gone?  In his grief he might have built this house, beautiful, though it would never last, because she had not.  It might have been part of his careful calculations for the house to collapse away as a tactile memorial to the woman he’d lost.

We left the house.  We knew by then that she couldn’t hold us, couldn’t hold anyone, may not last to see her hundredth birthday.  I stood in front of the house again on the way out, and I saw a tragedy.