Unfinished

The house in which I grew up had many eccentricities to which any old house is entitled. The oppressive summer heat would sometimes literally bake the sap of the decades old indoor tongue and groove pine walls in the downstairs rooms, even through the paint that covered their surfaces.

On a night like this, the tin on the front porch would rattle in protest as the strong winter wind used it for a cymbal to beat out a mysterious weather tune. The loose weatherboards would clap their hands in honor to the power of nature evidenced by the winter rain storm which hammered the tin roof. Some of the rain might just find its way through her west elevation, seeping through these same weatherboards or ill fitted windows both upstairs and down.

The room in the east end of the upstairs was dark at all times. Both dirty windows were shaded during the day by box elder trees. The room was incomplete, unceiled and unpainted. It shielded years of relatively undisturbed gray dust. The brown walls lit by a single dim bulb gave way to black shadows over the finished room on the western end of the upstairs. The bulb’s ability to light the rafters supporting the underside of the roof which peaked at least fifteen feet above the floor was incredibly insufficient. The darkness deepened when night fell as much of the brown yielded visibility to darkness.

The only door to the unfinished upstairs room was homemade, closed by a string tied to a nail on the door wrapped around another nail in the jamb. Once this primitive latch was unwound, to the left a large rough shelf that held my mother’s scores of canning jars was revealed. At the shelf’s end, just behind the front window, stood an ominous black fifty gallon oil drum to catch the water that oozed through the leak in the valley of the dormer. When the barrel was at least two-thirds full, my father would raise that window and pour the water over the porch roof to seep into the ground below.

There were two square holes, approximately two feet by two feet, cut into the front and back walls of the room at the floor to provide access to the front porch and kitchen attics. The front access was about center of the shelf that held Mother’s canning jars; the other was about midway center of the back wall, mostly covered by the remainder of the unused building materials intended at one time to finish the room.

The room’s entry door opened against the exposed chimney, partly built from actual stone undoubtedly mined from the surface of the property when the house was constructed. This stone extended about half way up the inside of the east room. The remainder of the chimney was constructed of red brick that disappeared through the hole dead center of the roof.

The room had few furnishings. There was an unfinished baby’s coffin that stood in front of the chimney. It was reputed to have been crafted by the house’s original owner, Burl Warwick. The coffin was unlined, filled with straw and protected inside the wooden box that would have served as the coffin’s vault in days of old.

There was little else located in the room—some old dining room chairs; an old rocking chair stuffed with straw; and a crude shelf that contained some old math textbooks, steel traps, and a popcorn popper undoubtedly used in the two downstairs fireplaces. My father used the room to store his “tater” onions and potatoes during the winter.

Doesn’t this room sound appealing? Wouldn’t you like to visit it with me? If only we could. The house burned in the late 1990s, resulting in the death of four children who were sleeping in the house, most likely this very upstairs, very possibly in the dark room which I have just described.

I visited this room many times while I lived in the house from 1971 through 1984, and I revisit it very often in my memory to this very day. I always found the room fascinating in a foreboding way, and I never entered it during the day, especially not at night, without a certain sense of sadness of what could have been and what might be.

I loved the house, and I loved living there. I have a love for this old house of my childhood rented from others that I cannot have even for the house I own today. You see, this house was a literal home with the security of Mom and Dad while being anything my imagination wished it to be—a general store, jail, government building, church, school, doctor’s office . . .

Yet she was unfinished, as was and is my life. My ties with her were broken in the summer between my first and second college year when Mother and I were told by the owner to move. I have never gotten over that forced relocation, not that I bear the owner any malice—it was more a question of unfinished business in my mind. I simply was not ready to give up my old friend.

I visited once and only once after Mother and I moved in June of 1984. Some former neighbors of ours moved there, and I stopped by one afternoon. I so wanted to ask to see every room where I had romped as a youngster and youth, to look out the windows where I once saw the sunset, to once more relive in my mind the memory of those days of wonder. I was too polite to ask, and the offer was not forthcoming, so I left more dissatisfied than if I had not made the visit.

The house was like a lot of people I have known. Her weatherboards and tin roof rattled and shivered in the cold winter wind, sweated pine sap in the hot summer heat, cried leaking rainwater from her window, and excreted black soot from her chimney. She had a past and an incomplete future which I could not share. I was allowed to share her incomplete present for a while before life forced me to move on to my own indefinite future. Though I tried once unsuccessfully to retrieve a little of the magic we shared, she reached the end of her existence on this earth without me, both of us unfulfilled.

You see, both she and I were incomplete when we shared our time together. Unknown to me then, this foretold of other relationships I was to share with others in my life who, like my dear childhood home, had a past, shared my present, and finished their futures apart from me. I never understood until now how fortunate I am to have had such a great inanimate teacher, nor how precious are those lost relationships.

All I have left of her materially is one weatherboard plank and the slab of stone that served as her front step. But the memories! No amount of money could buy them from me, and no amount of money can pay my way to go back in time to relive them. I grieve both for my childhood home and my friends and loved ones from whom the circumstances of life have parted my acquaintance. How I miss them all.

Life goes on. My future, though incomplete, is reaching its ultimate destiny every day. Former relationships and houses, though they have passed away, have cleared the path for new homes and relationships. How I thank God for each of my friends, past and present, for each has in some way paved the way for the present I enjoy and the future I will achieve.

Perhaps my thoughts are best summarized by the following lyrics:

As my mind wanders back to the quaint little shack
Where in childhood I used to play;
There with mother and dad, we were happy and glad
As we whiled the sweet moments away;
We would all kneel in prayer and in reverence there
We would praise the redeemer on high.
Now in sadness I pine for that old home of mine
And I long for that mother's love.

I'd like to go back to that quaint little tumble-down shack.
I'd like to spend a day where in heaven forever I'll stay,
But time won't turn back; we must travel til Jesus shall call.
Then we'll be happy in that land where no cabins fall.

Though I drifted away from childhood's sweet play
I can still hear those voices sweet.
They are calling me back to that quaint little shack
Where the circle will never more meet;
But til that happy day, up in heaven they say,
We will praise the redeemer on high.
Now in sadness I pine for that old home of mine
And I long for that mother's love.

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Nolan Jeffress
Where No Cabins Fall lyrics © John Hartford Music
(accessed on Google December 17, 2019)