Held inside the Bones

“This house has good bones,” I say to Nick, as we lay on a futon mattress in what will someday be our bedroom, looking up at the framing of our house.

It smells like fir and sawdust; and though its midnight, its June in Alaska, still light enough to see the beam-work. To see the various angles of wood. And the space in-between.

I can see Olive asleep on her mattress, two rooms away, a bathroom between ours and hers, no drywall yet to separate us.

"Will we always be able to walk through the walls?” she asked earlier, as her small hands held the posts and she swung between rooms.

“No we’ll fill them in eventually.”

“Please can we just leave one open so I can sneak through? Please Mom, please!”

An open wall, what a concept-- a passageway for children, for light, a way to escape, a way to connect.

A wall that is not a wall.

A pliable boundary with openings for air, for thought, for change. Nothing is fixed, no block insurmountable, no opinion stone.

Oh, to be seven, when the best kind of walls are ones you can still sneak through.

I keep thinking about this house of ours like a body, the skeleton constructed, sturdy, strong, just waiting for the organs of plumbing for fluids, the muscle of electrical wires for power.

Next comes the fat, insulation to keep us warm on winter nights, when the thermometer falls below zero, when the snow doesn't even think about melting.

Warm in a summer like this one, when rain takes center stage, when we have yet to see a long stretch of sunshine and warmth like the past few years that saw us Alaskans spoiled by actual heat, stripping off layers, exposing our white skin, walking with bare feet across black sand.

Not this summer, where I have yet to stop wearing my winter jacket, boots and hats. Where puddles surround our house, the ground churned over for construction, the only grass growing unwanted in my garden beds. Where I wake up cold and stay chilled indefinitely.

Which leads me to the heart of our home, our soon to arrive wood stove, that will burn Spruce we felled over the years as we cleared this land, pumping warm air to the various chambers of our house designed to let the heat rise.

“You could have built another room upstairs,” some folks say when they see the design, with nothing but open air above the living room till the rafters that hold up our green metal roof.

Ah, but I want room to breathe, an open airy home, a spacious body to hold mine, bones and all-- so I can continue to shape-shift, to stretch beyond what I ever thought possible.

So I can sneak through the walls that attempt to contain me, swing from one space to the next.

Comments

[Ginna]

It's beautiful!!!! So happy for your Home skeleton, full of possibilities for your strong and surprising sweet family. Tons of love!

[ColbyS]

My bed room had a passage way to my mom's room ... looked like an ironing closet from the outside, and had a door on both sides, yet was a way to access both rooms sorta like a tiny narrow window that didn't reach the floor.
:-) The door was the same quality as all 1940s doors inside the house ... the entire thing was the shape of a shutter, just a little bit bigger.

[Kate]

Wow it's really coming together now!!! So exciting and beautiful!

[Valerie Demming]

I love the views outside your windows. Each one looks like a separate picture framed by the edging of the window...