Tappahannock, Virginia
The transformation of a squishy caterpillar into a graceful butterfly of splendiferous colors is certainly a metaphor for the not-so-little project that has engaged me for three days now. Dismantling a 72-year old house and attempting to save all the lumber out of it for re-use can be a bit of a complicated process. Taking a twelve-pound hammer to the interior of this house full of memories makes little sense. Splintering the history of three generations does not add to a local sense of community or history.
The veracity of this thought was proven when the grown granddaughter of the woman selling this house stopped by in the afternoon to see what we are doing to ‘her’ house. She welled up with tears when she saw that I had just carefully removed a small glass-fronted cabinet from the kitchen wall and saved it for use as a book cabinet in another room. It seems we have a sacred responsibility to respect the history of even the smallest innocuous house. It was once bigger than life to a small girl who went to Granny’s house. The cabinet was carefully made by her grandfather decades ago.
When butterflies emerge from cocoons, their struggles to get free actually cause fluid to course through the veins of their wings, giving them necessary stiffness for flight. If one cuts open cocoons and butterflies don’t have a struggle, young wings never ‘inflate’ and the hapless creatures will die. Strength and life comes from struggle.
Tracy Kidder wrote a grand book, House, chronicling the compelling true story of the construction of a home in Massachusetts. More than 300 pages describe the evolution of the design, the negotiations with builders, the ground breaking, and the roof raising. What added great success to Kidder’s work is the portrayal of struggle and victory coming from embracing a large complex project and staying with it through thick and thin. He focused entirely on the human aspirations and struggles behind the project.
As we attempt to take a tiny little house filled with memories of three generations of a family and make it into a new home for another family, I am reminded of new life that comes from struggle. In the afternoon butterflies made visits to us, challenging us to stay the course, knowing the best things in life require a good bit of work, rarely presented on a silver platter.
Evening was given to wandering around a bucolic school campus on the river, collecting images of another day of transformation.
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