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Sic transit gloria mundi
Jul. 22nd, 2004 08:16 pmSpent the afternoon on a walk-through of that old house across the river, client and engineer and contractor and all, discussing what needed to be done to where. That was an elegant place once, built around 1850, parquet floors and pressed tin ceilings with elaborate sconces, a double living room that had embossed leather wall coverings, all that sort of thing. Little oddities like a plastered cistern in the basement because the house was built before public water supplies.
Most recently occupied by an alcohol rehab program for the local Abenaki tribe. The place has been remodeled and remodeled to within an inch of its life, doors walled over and other doors roughly punched through walls, rooms divided up with walls studded in right across the carpeting, cheap fiberboard wood paneling, sheet flooring, K-Mart grade kitchen cabinets, roof leaks, you name it. Now it is going to be transition housing for chronic homeless people with mental disabilities.
Sad for the house, very useful for society.
And then I remembered my grandmother's place in northern Michigan, been in the family probably a hundred years -- much of an age and type with this -- and how my mother and uncle sold it after Grannie's death with the contract requiring the place be torn down. They didn't want their home turned into a rooming house. Last time I was in our old home town, a gas station stood on that corner. Still the restaurant across the street and the Dairy Queen across the _other_ street and the old garage on the back alley and the Vernor's Ginger Ale sign painted on the wall of the barn over _there_, but no house.
I don't know whether Mom and Uncle Julius were right or wrong. Strange feeling.
15 miles, about an hour. Yeah, the bike computer is dead.
Most recently occupied by an alcohol rehab program for the local Abenaki tribe. The place has been remodeled and remodeled to within an inch of its life, doors walled over and other doors roughly punched through walls, rooms divided up with walls studded in right across the carpeting, cheap fiberboard wood paneling, sheet flooring, K-Mart grade kitchen cabinets, roof leaks, you name it. Now it is going to be transition housing for chronic homeless people with mental disabilities.
Sad for the house, very useful for society.
And then I remembered my grandmother's place in northern Michigan, been in the family probably a hundred years -- much of an age and type with this -- and how my mother and uncle sold it after Grannie's death with the contract requiring the place be torn down. They didn't want their home turned into a rooming house. Last time I was in our old home town, a gas station stood on that corner. Still the restaurant across the street and the Dairy Queen across the _other_ street and the old garage on the back alley and the Vernor's Ginger Ale sign painted on the wall of the barn over _there_, but no house.
I don't know whether Mom and Uncle Julius were right or wrong. Strange feeling.
15 miles, about an hour. Yeah, the bike computer is dead.
