“In the Voice of the Olsen House”

By Anne-Marie Oomen
Sun staff writer
The following story, told from the perspective of the house, was read at a public reception held by Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear on Thursday, August 7 at the Olsen farm, located north of The Homestead on M-22 in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

*Based in part on the transcripts of the taped interviews with Alfred and Lorraine Mason by Tom Van Zoeren. The rest is imagination.
“A house being built is lonely, like being half born. I tell you. I haven’t spoken to no one of this, but when they poured the concrete, they set it in well-drained sand so it wouldn’t crack so easy with the winters I got to deal with here. But it took a long time to complete a house like me back then. A long time in the making. Two years or so before the farm was complete, and they raced the winter to get it done, this thing I am. That was lonely thinking, and it filled me with longing. But for what? A house doesn’t know what it wants for long time, maybe almost to the end, when the doors come and the windows get set. I’ll tell you how it felt.
It was good, this place they found, this site for a house. You know, people don’t think right about where they put their houses sometimes, but this one, they did right by me, they put me near the road. The big curve wasn’t always so big, but anybody come this way, they see me, all clean and gleaming in my fresh clapboard. Think about it. If you were a house dreaming to be a home, what would you want. Sunlight, fields, a view of the world around you, a tree barrier for the wind. Think of it, a house in the making has half-built dreams, just like a child. I felt it in my two by fours, which really were two by fours back then, none of this half inch shy like they do these days—you carpenters know what I’m talking about—I felt it in the studs and headers, the rafters and the posts, something just out of visibility, something in the making of— what is it? Oh, in the walls, here and here and here and here, 28 by 28. Dimensions. I have dimensions, and then it starts to happen, this way we take on shape, keep out and let in the weather. If it’s good, we let in enough light to let a cat sleep in a pool of sun or a child try to take the light from the beam streaming through the doors. A house sees what happens inside, but all at once, in every room, so history is not easy for a house. It’s thick with knowing and stories that tumble into each other, from room to room. And all the voices. But I’m ahead of myself.
You want that view, that good open land where the cows low and the potato fields green up in the heat. You want that first because you got to stay in one place for a long time. There were no Robert Foulkes to move building around back then. Then, when the carpenters put the windows in, you see for the first time, how green and pure and fresh things are. You feel yourself start to bend, to breathe with the weather you are still open to. That first summer, 1919, there was only the work of me, and I didn’t know who was who or what I was, but one day, there was this woman. She came and walked through before things were done yet, and she put her hands on the unpainted walls and touched the not yet varnished oak woodwork, and she walked from room to room. She had been there all along, but she came alone this time, and walked and walked, and sometimes she murmured to herself, and she touched a doorjamb here and a sill there. She ran her fingers on the glass that already needed cleaning and she tasted the dust from the saws. She shook her head and tisked a bit, but she walked like she was dreaming, and I could see that she would be the one, the first one, to come to me. Her name was Hattie, though I didn’t know that yet, I didn’t know the language of human dreams, only that she had touched the wood of my interior differently than the others.
Sometime later, he came, the man. He was determined. I could feel it when he came, the way he stepped hard on his heals, and when he touched it was to make things right. His dream was bigger than the house, it made the barn and the outbuildings right down to something called a two-holer. He was clear in his thoughts. When he touched it was to see how smooth, how straight. He carried a level and checked for plumb and square everywhere it would lay. I knew then, whatever being I was, would have the strength to live as long as they did, maybe as long as their children did.
And then, there was weather. You know the storms we have here. How they come across the big water that I cannot see, but know is there because its moisture touches my every seam and pours down the roof. And it was fall, and the leaves dropped and things were still being done, but still they did not come, they did not come, this Hattie and this man. And then, just after first snow, in the Month I know now they call November, they came. At the time I now know is called Thanksgiving. I didn’t know what Thanksgiving meant, only that it was the day they finally came, and then I felt how it was with the two of them. And his name was Charles. For they were a new family and there were things that happened in certain rooms that I never did learn the words for but it made everyone happy, you know. So that was the early time, and the loneliness died in me and I was filled up with what they did, the canning and the cows, the vegetable stand that went up by the gas tank right on the road, and that’s the way to kill the loneliness a house has until its full, make a meal, many meals, make soup with the hog that rutted in the shed out back, fill me up with smells of living so the walls, like skin, take on the odors of the family, the scent of the way they eat, the way they live enters the timbers, the plaster, the vents and glass and makes the world, or a house, a whole.
There were others, the mother who lived in the little house out back, who brought the sewing at night, and Hattie never complained though she was tired with the day the canning jar exploded. There was that Guernsey cow kept getting out, there were the apples to be picked and stored and shipped to some place far away. They brought work into the house like offerings, the berries of summer, big as a thimble, grown in a valley out back. They brought scraps of dresses and quilted in the parlor. Hattie stayed up late, working the quilts, one for each of the girls that run through these rooms. A piece for each moment and blanket for each heart beating in my walls. A house starts to take seriously its work, it starts to know that it is the only thing between the cold and the hard things of the world. It can open and close and be a place of sweet warmth. If your people are sturdy, you stay sturdy. Charles hauled logs for the mills, and Hattie had to do the cows and everything else, and they worked, always, always there was work inside, outside my rooms. So I held up. I held up.
A house doesn’t know how the years pass. Doesn’t know what time is like for human dreamers. At night, a house like me stays quiet for the folks, unless the winter gets too cold, and then you got to shift a bit. There were cold nights, and then spring would come but I wasn’t a house to count the seasons. I had work to do with that family and all the children. I had to keep them safe and warm, Hattie and Charles, and hold and hold for the time.
But even with all I learned, I didn’t know about the way humans die. He was older and he plowed the gardens with horses. I saw once, he fell, and the horses just stopped and waited, and he got up and kept going but I knew then, something would change. He left the house in 1949. They took him out a different way, and he didn’t come back. I thought then that Hattie might leave too, the winter was so long, my roof got weak, and she was, what’s the word, sad. But in the spring, she went to her bee hives, murmuring like she did, and she made her first loaf of bread, put a little spring flour in to make it lighter. I could see then she’d stay a while and I braced up.
The daughter came, the one called Lorraine, she worked like her mama, and when it came time, I could feel a change, and she became the one to stay. She was stronger than the others, and she was the one with her Alfred for sure, for a long time, and it was still good, though there was wear in my corners and tear in my soffits. But then Hattie did leave for sure, and then years passed and there was more change and hard talk.
This time everyone left.
Now like I said, a house don’t know time, but it was time then that filled my frame, time crawling into every nook and cranny and time that dirtied the windows, along with a couple bad winters, and time that made me lose my luster. There was no one there to touch the walls and make the glass shine. I was alone and not made to be a house alone at all. But the stuff in me would not cave in, would not let up for I still saw the open land, and though the buildings all around had gone in decay, my friend the old barn stayed, empty too, both of us with that question in our walls about how long we could hold on. It’s memory, those wild stories I told you about, the tumbling ones that kept me company for all those years, and kept me as strong and calm as I could be—given what time can do to anything. I didn’t give in, and so it was no surprise, because I’d worked so hard at being a good house, that someone noticed and one day opened the doors, and one day swept the floors and then the changes came again and the roof was new and the yard trimmed and the woodwork washed and the kitchen scrubbed and people now come and go. I understand it’s to be a different kind of family now. That though no one sleeps here, there will be people always entering, strangers who need to see how it was when I was new, and how it was with the good folks who made me. There will be a hundred, I hear, or more, every time my doors open, and I will be a house again, full of newer stories, including I am told, my own.
If you look out at the fields and the roads, you know, something makes the world a better place. If you care for me, I’ll care for you, and give you what I can, in my limited way, of what I know of being a house, a shelter from the cold. So come. Enter into this story, a slow and clapboard one, a story made of rooms and old floors and the long light of late summer.”