2023/6 CONSTRUCTION

Our "new" home in winter
now 29 years old

Nearly three decades ago, when I was half my age and in the heat of mothering pre-adolescents, adolescents and teenagers, we decided the kitchen in our old house needed to be changed. The process of discussing those changes and getting construction bids led us to deciding to just build a whole new house. I’ve already written, years ago, about how it came about… about finding this lot and hiring our friend and fellow baseball coach Jerry Preston as General Contractor. Right now, sitting in our now so familiar family room, I am recalling a specific scene, 29 years ago right about this time of year, when I stood in this very room, the walls brand new and not yet painted, the windows framed in and what is now our rock fireplace just a pile of stones we had collected from the creek behind the old house. I had brought donuts over for the workers, an almost daily offering to the wonderful workers who built this house. I can recall the scent of flesh sawn wood, the clean, cold scent of disturbed woods that provided the footprint for this place. I can smell mortar being mixed and hear the voice of Merrill Law instructing the two apprentices how to lay the stones. I wanted the fireplace to have the stones stacked vertically over the opening, and to come forward with smaller and smaller stones to a cement mantle that curved out. I kept searching my mind for the right collection of words to explain what I wanted. Finally, I found a long thick cardboard roll sitting in the corner of one of the rooms, some piece of leftover construction form, like an oversized cardboard leftover from a wrapping paper roll or the inside of a roll of paper towels. I lifted the long cylinder up above the lower section of rocks they had been placing one above the other. “If we could just somehow set this up here” … I groaned as I tried to balance the piece with my arms…” Then create a frame around it and pour the cement in, I think it would work.”   

Merrill looked a little confused, so I found other words to explain myself. After the third go round of re-explaining the idea, he got it. His eyebrows relaxed and he nodded his head and moved forward, grabbing pieces of wood and wire. By golly, by morning, when I came back with a fresh new baker’s dozen glazed Tasty’s Donuts, there was a form placed ready for wet cement. Now I sit daily in my easy chair facing this fireplace and see the shadow in the curve on the cement mantle.

The curved cement mantle on our rock fireplace.

No one would know this but me, not even Dave, but I scratched the initials of our little family in the mortar on the west side of this fireplace. I suppose it was an effort to keep us here as long as it stands.

I vividly remember planting my feet in this very room when the hickory floors were not yet placed, when we walked on plywood and the walls had wet drywall mud on them. 

"DMC" David Michael Connors
scratched into the mortar between stones.
There is also a J, S, K and A
(John, Sarah, Kate and Annie)

I remember inhaling the moment and pretending I was living here, that it was Christmastime, and our kids were in their pj’s and there was a roaring fire in that new fireplace. The heart-swell I felt in that moment of forethought has been relived year after year. 

Could I have imagined how wonderful
these grand-treasures would be back then?

Who gets such a charmed existence?

Lord, make me worthy of such blessings.