On February 14, 1986, Dave’s bended knee marriage proposal arrived in his Valentine’s card. Without knowing his intentions or what his heart might say, the card I’d already written for him just said yes. Yes, to whatever our lives together might be. Yes, to whatever risks and opportunities lay ahead. So, in a spring made desperate by a custody battle for Em and Amanda, we began the next steps of our life: secretly hunting for rings in Kalispell after a lawyer’s conference; asking Ron and Claire if we could marry on their lawn; and beginning our search for the right house with our realtor friend, Bill Spilker.
Bill was pretty onto us – and to the dilemmas of our life. Aware, in general, that house-hunting had the capacity to solidify or destroy marriages. Aware that our relationship might be that much more fragile and that our wish to find a family home, a home for the girls, made our search urgent, dream-filled.
Given our professions, Dave and I both had historic houses in mind. So Bill started us out with mid-sized Victorians. It didn’t take us long to dismiss those. Octopus-armed converted coal furnaces spooked me. We saw whole dwellings sans closets. With god-awful indoor-outdoor carpet. Fake bead board. Walls papered with roosters or cows. Bill next directed our search to bungalows, one of which, located in a lovely neighborhood, very much caught our fancy. Except that it cost too much, needed work, and was drenched in pink paint. I had to talk myself down. Still, Dave and I were having a great time. Learning that our instincts about space and grace matched.
It was April before Bill suggested that we look at a newly listed property over on Choteau Street. We pulled up to a staid looking rancher. Brown trim and beige metal siding. Single story. No claim to architectural elegance except a whisper of a prairie-style overhang. Nothing especially striking on the outside, except enormous partially dead banks of stickery grey evergreens.
At first glance, nothing bowled us over inside either. Really bad mustard gold carpet. A lot of mid-70s bilious green paint. A workable kitchen marred by one wall of orange and green plaid wallpaper. Ordinary sized bedrooms.
Then we looked more carefully. The living and dining rooms had simple coved ceilings. The walls were real plaster and the kitchen cupboards real wood. A working fireplace caught Dave’s eye. The de rigueur picture window looked right up and over the evergreen bunkers to a stunning view of Mount Helena. The dining room sported a chandelier. Compared to Victorian candidates, the bedrooms and hallways had decent closets. Real wood pocket doors separated the dining room and bedrooms from the kitchen. We found a functional laundry chute in the modest upstairs bathroom.
A well-built staircase led to partially finished basement spaces. We could see joists on 12 and 16 inch centers and learned that the original 1950 owner was a builder. We found a half-functional rumpus room, already outfitted with a brown and beige tiled floor and an entire pegboard wall. In his mind, Dave started building bookshelves around its perimeter. He salivated over his own bathroom and concrete laundry tubs and an unfinished office space with room enough for two separate desks. A storage room with deep built-in shelves. Dave loved basements.
And then we went outdoors. The house had a two tiered backyard with old linear flower beds. A spreading lilac bush loomed over lilies of the valley just beginning to come up. There was a patio, a vegetable garden, and a raspberry patch on the lower tier. A fifties garage with some shelving and a dog cubby sat beside the house. And an ancient Russian olive whose massive arms offered easy climbing dominated the space.
When we walked back to Bill’s car, we knew that we’d found the house that felt right. Not the bungalow we’d pictured. But a house built well to be a home. Well even more, our home. We waited until we were alone to be sure of each other’s feelings and then could not wait to call Bill and say yes and meet him and put our conviction in writing. For 24 hours, we lived with buyers’ anxiety: would our offer be enough to claim what seemed already ours.
Within the next month, we lost our bid for custody, got married without telling our parents or Historical Society friends, and schlepped the contents of our two previous dwellings into one. Along the way Dave painted out the bilious green with a soft off-white and began measuring for his first set of basement shelves.
That maiden year we celebrated our good fortune. After tucking the girls into their new bedroom in the dead of night, we giggled as they woke up early to explore the new space. We held a marriage celebration that July for all the folks we’d hadn’t told about our wedding. To the dismay and astonishment of Em and Amanda, a Canadian Anglican Catholic priest solemnly blessed every upstairs room. We acquired two mini-lop 4-H bunnies, pioneer inhabitants of what would be an extensive garage rabbit warren. We celebrated a first family Christmas with a tree that glittered through two picture windows and a fireplace replete with stockings. The first Easter with a yard full of eggs. Picnics on the patio. Raspberries to freeze and enter in the fair. Wood from the North Fork stacked up for winter fires.
Over twenty years, beyond the “firsts,” our home protected and defined us. It became the base from which we cared for Dave’s parents—who found a little house a block away. The quiet to which Dave and I returned when George and Dorothy and then my parents died. The place we retreated to mourn when a beloved bunny and my first cat had to be put to sleep.
It was a summer shelter for both girls and the full time haven to which Amanda turned before her 7th grade year. The scene of a hundred embroidery and art and photography and sewing projects and all the tag ends of paint and string and fabric. The rumpus room where girlfriends could gather. Space for first grandbabies to be rocked and photographed. Memo’s dining room introduction to mashed potatoes as play dough. The living room where we met Amanda’s dates. Her bedroom with a window better suited for escape than we realized.
It was the refuge to which Dave and I both returned after medical traumas. Dave’s heart attacks and lung infections and gut surgeries. The living room sofa and southern light that helped heal my mastectomy and hysterectomy.
The house hosted a steady set of holiday meals and company, alive with the smell of eight loaves of Dave’s cranberry bread baking at one time or of a fat turkey roasting while the Green Bay Packers played on the downstairs big screen. A counter for the crock pot roast which our friends the Doigs minded before I got home from work and we could launch a cocktail hour in the backyard.
The house welcomed our first and second and third computers and the hours Dave and I both devoted to writing. Dave would fall asleep on Grandma Kitty’s sofa in front of a basketball game and then get up at midnight to finish an article. Before we realized it, Dave had filled his A through Z filing cabinets with research materials and had to establish his A-2 through Z-2 system. Dave added another wall of shelves to the rumpus room and then one more in the basement bedroom. I moved my own office space around the house until Amanda’s departure for college allowed me to create a small foothold in half of her room.
Fall and spring found us putting up and taking down a set of old fashioned storm windows that buffered us from winter—a bit. The house and its fireplace kept us warm when January and February 1989 brought a month of below zero weather and then a train wreck, cutting off the town’s power. In summer, the upstairs could get toasty, but Dave always found relief in the basement.
We didn’t remodel much, that not being a skill either of us had or a desire we harbored. Dave painted out the plaid kitchen wall. We found accord in the paintings we hung. Dave papered the stairwell with his favorite pictures. I slip covered one sofa and bought a new one. Dave’s parents provided two recliners for our basement. I reached a place where the mustard gold carpet didn’t even register. And god knows it wouldn’t wear out. In 2006, after Dave’s stroke, we added railings and handholds to places that suddenly seemed dangerous.
The house witnessed our anger and fear and torments, too. The minor frustrations of misbehaving plumbing. The mid-size disagreements over parenting. Good bye kisses left ungiven. A teenager’s huffs. Lonely echoes however loud the ball game. Punitive silences. Still, the house remained our shelter, our fastness from more damaging storms.
There’s a lot I don’t believe about religious explanations of our universe. But I do believe in its energy and the tiny satchels of it that each of us hold for the duration of our lives. I believe we shed or share a bit that energy with spaces and people throughout. So I trust that the house on Choteau Street is suffused with our spirits. In it, until the morning of July 18, 2006, we were truly and deeply at home. From the first, it had been the family haven we’d sought: functional, unpretentious, lovely. We never aspired to any other house. But that July morning, before the EMTS arrived, Dave’s heart stopped and though it restarted briefly, the detritus of syringes and tape left behind in our bedroom told the next story.
I lived in the house on Choteau two years after Dave’s death. In the heat of summer, I watered the yard and harvested stunted potatoes. I wintered there as well, buying a DVD player so that, except for laundry, I never needed to go into the basement. I found that Dave’s spirit, dying and living, infused his office and rumpus room. I began to feel uneasy, caught in space that was no longer mine, trespassing or talking with ghosts.
When I found a condo whose light and views gave me air, I put the house on the market, donated Dave’s books to the Salish-Kootenai Community College, his research work to the Historical Society, and many Walter belongings to the girls. My new young realtor wanted me to paint the living room, strip out the gold carpet, and add a shower to the upstairs bathroom. I resisted his arguments. New owners would want it their way, not mine. Instead, I wrote a love letter to the house – and invited prospective buyers to read it. The house sold within a week. ©
