Out of Place: Losing the House

© Mark Honerkamp

The house is like a novel. For many years I called it “my father’s house,” but that was wrong. It is my mother’s house, and it has always been. It is my mother’s novel.

It is my mother’s house, my mother’s novel, because she is the one who found its bones. She was driving from her home in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Cape Cod, when, passing through the town of Middleboro, she saw the old house. It was scheduled to be torn down so that the new highway, Route 495, could be built, and my mother pulled over, curious. The house had been built in 1726, a real Cape Codder with cedar shingles, wide oak floorboards, and thick hewn beams the color of chocolate. Before my mother left she had purchased the beams, floorboards, and paneling for fifty dollars. She knew just what she was going to do with them, too. A couple of years before my parents had purchased an acre of land on Cape Cod, buying it for one of those ridiculously small amounts of money that make future generations so envious. They had not been able to afford to build on the land yet, however—until now, that is, until my mother found the bones of what my family would always call the Cape House.

It is of course a sign of great good luck, and unusual privilege, to grow up in a family that owns two homes, particularly in a country where many own none. It was less obviously so back then, when each Massachusetts town seemed to have a corresponding summer town on Cape Cod, and when the houses themselves were modest, cottages and beach houses, and not the swollen re-creations of suburbia they have become. If that sense of privilege was not often verbally appreciated by the children in my family, it was bodily so. Every summer after school ended, my mother and the four of us headed from Worcester down to East Dennis, not to return again until after Labor Day. That meant summers of romping on the beach and swimming in the bay and bonfires and lobsters and never getting the sand completely out of your sheets. It meant a second group of friends, a better group, to my mind, and a house that my mother ruled with an easy hand, since my father, and his temper, were only weekend visitors. There was a casual sloppiness to the house that she embraced and he resented, and while it was too small for our boisterous clan, that didn’t matter, as we were always spilling out onto the beaches and into the water.

The house stood on a small hill right across from the harbor, an easy walk to the beach. Once the builders had reconstructed the house, my mother filled it with antiques and paintings, some of those paintings her own, and comfortable couches and chairs. The guest room was called the Strawberry Room, and that theme played out from the paintings to the sheets. There were also the occasional living-room throw pillow with a kitschy saying on it, like: “One Martini, Two Martini, Three Martini, Floor!”

Outside, cedar shingles covered the exterior walls like scales on a reptile—organic, living—and the roses seemed to hold up the rickety fence. The house changed little over the years while everything around it changed. Most of the modest houses in the neighborhood were torn down and large McMansions were built in their places. While these new buildings jutted out their chests, Trump-like, the Cape House kept humble.

The house sometimes felt as much role model as dwelling. It stayed fine, artistic, modest in the midst of the arrogant, new, and crass. It could laugh at itself. It had a few pretensions—who doesn’t?—but it mostly let it all hang out. It didn’t cover its beams. They were right there, rough-hewn, crossing the ceiling of the living room and dining room for all to see.

Of course in this day...