This Old House

Last week I wrote about our little town of Ulysses (technically it is a borough, but that’s just the official title for towns in Pennsylvania) celebrating its sesquicentennial. It was incorporated in 1869. It occurred to me later that our house, at least the oldest part of it, was also built in 1869. So we have a sesquicentennial of our own to celebrate. The original part of the house is what is now our living room, bedroom, and music room on the first floor, and the three bedrooms upstairs. There was no electricity or indoor plumbing in the original house. An addition was added sometime before the turn of the century (the 19th into the 20th century) that is what is now our dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and woodshed downstairs, and the upstairs bathroom and extra bedroom.

The oldest known photo of our house.

In November of 1922, my grandparents, Lawrence and Mabel Howe, bought the house and its three acres of land from Mary F. Chase for $1,700.00 according to the old bank mortgage papers I have. They lived here for a few years and had their chiropractic office in what is now the downstairs bedroom. By 1930, the year my father was born, they had moved to the town of Galeton and sold the house to my great aunt Esther, my grandfather’s sister. The story I heard was that they sold it to her for a pittance to pay back money Aunt Esther had given them to help them during hard times. Aunt Esther and her sisters, my aunts Sarah and Eleanor, lived here for the next seventy years. Aunt Sarah died in 1968 and Esther and Eleanor continued to live here until 1999 when Esther died and Eleanor moved into an assisted living facility in Ulysses. We bought the house from Aunt Esther’s estate and moved here in January 2000. Aunt Eleanor died in 2002. So in 2022 we will celebrate the Howes living in this house for a century. I think we should start planning now to have some sort of party.

I think I’ve mentioned before a few times that I love this old house. It is indeed an old house. You can see evidence of its age in every part of it from the cellar to the roof. It sits on a fieldstone foundation. The basement has a dirt floor. You can still see bits of the first cloth wrapped electrical wiring strung on ceramic insulators nailed to the beams in the cellar. The ruins of the old coal chute from the woodshed into the cellar are still there. The walls in the rooms of the house, the ones we haven’t worked on, are covered with layers and layers of wallpaper. The hardwood floors on the first floor are solid, but need refinishing. We’ve done some work in some of the rooms. We installed a wood stove in the living room. We took out the lath and plaster walls in the dining room and put in sheet rock. Two of the upstairs bedrooms and the stairway and upstairs hall have had their walls redone. We’ve replaced the old floor furnace with a new one. We put new flooring in the bathrooms and replaced one of the toilets. We’ve added built-in bookshelves in two rooms. After we moved here we had the house resided and re-roofed and insulated and some new windows installed. Miriam is remodeling her bedroom right now. But other than that, most of the interior of the house is still just as it was when we moved here. There’s always something that needs to be done, some bit of wall crumbling, some leak that needs patching. The roof is deteriorating and needs to be redone. And we have plans and dreams for future improvements. We want to build a bigger porch. Someday we want to add on a bigger more modern kitchen. We talk about our plans all the time, but we are not handy or rich and so they get done very slowly if at all. But even as ramshackle as it is, I love this old house. I have happy memories of visiting my aunts here as a child and young adult. I have happy memories of living and raising my own family here. And the happiness goes on with my grown up children and my grandchildren coming here to make memories of their own. This is the place I’ve always wanted to live since I was a child and I feel so blessed that I actually live here. I hope the Howes live on here for a second century.

Last week the weather cooled a bit and the world is feeling and looking more autumnal every day. We had some rain, which perked up the garden and brought us a rainbow. We’ve had some very pretty sunsets. It seems we get our loveliest sunsets in the fall, which seems appropriate as this is the sunset season before winter’s night.

Monday's rainbow.

Sunset on Monday.

All summer I’ve waited for my morning glories to bloom. They got a late start and didn’t grow as vigorously as they usually do. Finally they began to form buds, but I was afraid they wouldn’t have a chance to open before frost came. On Wednesday the first flower opened. Two more opened on Thursday. They are called heavenly blue, and for a reason. They are one of the most beautiful shades of blue of any flower. I was so happy to see them.

Finally, the first morning glory!

We had a light frost on Friday morning. When I got up it was 32° and I could see from my window that there was frost in spots on the lawn. I didn’t have time to inspect the garden before I left for school. When I got home I did a tour expecting to find the more tender plants – the morning glories and the angel trumpets – scorched. I was amazed to find no damage at all. I was hoping it would kill off the Japanese beetles, but alas, no.

The rose is still trying to bloom and the Japanese beetles are determined to stop it.

We’ve had some interesting insect encounters during the week. We’ve been hearing an odd croaking noise coming from some spruce logs that are stacked along one of the orchard paths. I thought it was tree frogs hiding in the logs, but on listening closer, we found the sound was coming from inside the logs. I did a little research and determined that the noise is made by pine bark beetles eating their way through the wood. The beetles only feed on dead and dying spruce, and all of our spruce trees are dead or dying.

A white crab spider hiding in the nicotiana.

I also found one last monarch butterfly caterpillar. It had crawled into a patch of zinnias and was preparing to form its chrysalis. I went back the next day and there was the chrysalis. I hope it has time to hatch into a butterfly before the cold comes.

The caterpillar preparing to metamorphose.

It's chrysalis.

There are still some delightful flowers holding on in the garden – zinnias, cosmos, dahlias, petunias, and geraniums. Their bright colors make me happy. And my colchicums are at their very best right now.

Zinnias.

Cosmos.

Dahlias.

Geraniums.

Colchicums.

Yesterday we got up early (for a Saturday) and went to the temple. The drive to and from Palmyra was beautiful. The two and a half  hour (one way) trip takes us across almost the whole width of western New York, through picturesque towns, rolling forested hills, beautiful farmland, along Canandaigua Lake. We passed by fields of corn and pumpkins and bright green newly sprouted winter wheat. The hills around Canandaigua Lake are covered with vineyards. We saw trees starting to change into their autumn colors and gardens full of colorful chrysanthemums. The temple was busy, but still a peaceful and uplifting experience. On our way home we stopped at Wegman’s, our favorite grocery store, to eat lunch and do a little shopping. We got home in time for me to do the chores and get a little yard work done. It was a good day.

At the temple yesterday.

We’re at the end of September now and every day it looks more and more like fall. These days are perfect for taking walks and drives on the back roads. Miriam and Hannah go for a walk up the road and back almost every day and sometimes I go along. I think we will take a walk this afternoon after lunch and chores and naps. The week ahead looks warm and rainy – no frosts or freezes on the horizon for now. I’ll do what I can when I can in the garden. And I’ll enjoy the warm weather and the fall colors while they last.

One of our maples.