Landed History

When you purchase a house--or, more accurately, you get the bank to purchase it and begin paying them back for it--someone has to go through your title. The title is the legal document that says who holds a piece of property, and what conditions there may be on its ownership. Most of us never really look at our titles, because we pay lawyers to do that.

But in our neck of the woods there's much talk and some beginning action on drilling natural gas wells. We have an easement on our property, so I decided it might be wise to know whether the conditions of our easement would subject us to particular stresses from drilling companies. Thus I retrieved our abstract of title--the document that gives a relatively succinct account of the property's attributes--and made an electronic copy of it for our records.

I say the abstract of title is "relatively succinct" because here's what one hundred years' worth of property dealings looks like spread out on the floor:

One hundred years of buying, selling, dividing, conditioning, easing, and gifting. And of all the sixty-some names that occur on these documents, each one has a story of living here, working here, and raising families here. If only in the names (and not the legalese that of necessity fills these crinkly pages), one gets a snapshot of lives intersecting with the soil. These are abstracts of life lived in the town of Colesville, New York.

I had to separate four generations of documents that lawyers have no problem stapling together rather willy-nilly. Thus, as a side effect, I discovered that in the 1960s they had really tough staples. If you want to try this at home, get a staple remover ready.

~emrys

Body Revival

About a month ago Sara and I decided to take the collision insurance off our 1997 Mazda. According to those who know much better than I, the engine ought still to give us another 80,000 miles. But the car's value has depreciated enough that it's no longer worth the body work. So we had made the decision, but Sara had not yet called the insurance company. Thank God.

'Cause the next week someone hit the Mazda in the post office parking lot.

(And then he drove away. Let me take a moment of personal privilege and say that I think leaving the scene of an accident is perhaps one of the most heinous "minor" sins in human life. I try not to dwell on it anymore, and imagine that the guy with the trailer hitch who backed into our hood was so high up in his pickup that he didn't even know what happened. But it still peeves me.)

Here's what I found when I came out from dropping off my mail:

Our insurance company wanted to total the car, but gave us a choice. And we wrestled with it for about a week. Do we pay almost what the car is worth to get the hood fixed, and pray to get that 80,000 miles before it's hit again? Or do we go through the hassle of buying another vehicle?

It's amazing to me, by the way, that damaging one part of a vehicle (that still runs just fine) can make it worthy of the scrap heap. Sick and twisted, I tell you. Sick and twisted.

Thanks to the services of Hilltop Auto Repair, whose owner does high quality work at a reasonable price, we were presented with a way to keep the ol' Mazda. Here's the car after Dave replaced and repainted the hood:

If you look closely at the before and after photos, you'll notice that our headlights are clear of the moisture they had before. Thanks, Dave, for the TLC you gave to our Mazda!

And thanks for replacing some of our old plastic grille with chrome!

~emrys

Parenting Philosophy #107

It is my firm belief that it is never to early to teach a child how to use a salad spinner. In this house, consider it winter training in preparation for garden & berry season!

Letting the Picture Tell The Story

Thanks-Giving

Bucolicity

The lattice fence project was not complete without a rail on the top. Now instead of a purely functional child-death-prevention-device, we have a child-death-prevention-device upon which once can also set one's martini while gazing out into the bucolic splendor of our forested property and listening to our babbling brook.

I recommend you wait until summertime, however. It was a little chilly for outdoor martini drinking today.

~emrys

Ecclesiopoly

A couple of weeks ago while visiting my mom's house, my eyes alighted on a gift we bought her a couple of years ago. It's a game called "Wine-opoly," one of the many knock-offs of the vastly popular "Monopoly," first made in 1935 by Parker Brothers. For some strange reason--perhaps because I was on vacation and my mind had no other pressing projects to work on--I immediately thought it would be cool to have a Monopoly game based on church history. But "Churchhistoryopoly" makes for an unwieldy name. So I took the prefix from "ecclesiology"--the study of the church--and the suffix of the game, and . . . voila! Ecclesiopoly.

Not content to leave the idea in the stratosphere of the abstract, I got to work with Publisher, Wikipedia, and Google. After a few days on the machine, I was ready to proof the game board in black and white:

Due to a glitch in my Publisher program, the cool graphics of hands worshiping and the twin steeples of Our Lady of Tyn Church in Prague smeared when I printed them. Sigh. I'll have to go minimalist this time around.

Here are the sections getting trimmed before I glued them to the board:

One fun aspect of this project was learning obscure facts from global church history. Did you know that the apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus evangelized Armenia in the first century?

With the help of my in-laws' Monopoly game, I got the specs on the title deed cards. Of course, you don't put houses and hotels on your properties here; you put sanctuaries and cathedrals on them.

After discovering that a blank game board and box from the internet would cost me about $30, I decided to take a cardboard box we already owned and cannibalize it for a board and box. Cost of supplies for this part: $4 in packing tape.

Gluing the tiles to the game board took almost a whole bottle of rubber cement:

I had to do some serious work to customize the appearance of the bills. But once that task was done, they printed and cut easily. I wish multiplying cash were this easy in real life!

I chopped up some wooden dowels I had lying around for sanctuaries and cathedrals. Here they are before dying:

And here they are in food coloring, looking more like holiday okra and rhubarb:

Dye in food coloring overnight, bake them to dry, then rub lightly with linseed oil to keep the dye off the hands during play:

And at last, the final product, ready for play!

Now I just have to find some church history nerds who will be jazzed about play-testing a game called Ecclesiopoly. Where will I find them?

~emrys

The Power of Music

Two weeks ago we went to the home of friends for a dinner party. Gwendolyn played her usual social butterfly role, and behaved magnificently for a nine-month-old through visiting, appetizers, and the main course. But by the end of the meal the sedentary habit of adults was taking its toll. Gwendolyn began to fidget, fuss, and grab for everything breakable on the table.

Then our host introduced the string trio that would play for our pleasure between the main course and dessert. The three high school students (also brothers and sister) played with great expertise on violin, viola, and cello. They performed a set of classical pieces: Handel, Beethoven, and Bach. The melodious strains, that might as well have been played by seasoned professionals, floated through the chambers of our hosts' home.

And the music rapt our daughter. For the entire set, Gwendolyn stood in Sara's lap, listening to the notes, her eyes moving from one set of strings to another. The movement of the musicians' hands captivated her. Occasionally she would squeal with joy, then look at one of the adults around her with a big grin, as if to say, "Are you watching this? This is awesome!" In a moment, however, her eyes would return to following the fingertips that flew across the vibrating strings. I think it was as much a treat for the adults to see Gwendolyn enjoy the music as to hear the music itself.

As for me, when I was not watching my daughter soak up the sound, I was transported to a place I rarely visit. The liquid joy of the violin's notes took me back to high school and college, coming into the house unannounced and hearing the cascade of notes falling from my dad's bedroom. During those years he had begun to take up the violin again--after many years sacrificed to medical practice--and I could hear the reveling in his playing. He did not play as someone frantically trying to master a score; he did not play as a student trying to impress a jury. He played as someone discovering the emotion behind every note, as long-parted lovers would reminisce over a meal together.

The violin, and especially its rendition of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, swept me back to my father and moved my soul with memory. As Gwendolyn performed her own happy vocal arrangement for the piece, I wept for love and loss. It was a moment I could not have anticipated, though every time I see a violin I think of Dad. The music spoke in a way that remembrance alone could not. I re-lived the deep quiet of the house, the sound of mellifluous notes drifting down from upstairs, the dark blue carpet on the steps that carried the songs like a slow waterfall, the ache and strain of the final notes that rang from my dad's whole body as he danced with the movement of the bow. And I found myself in a different kind of joy.

Praise the Lord for the power of music!

~emrys

For the Album

Some time ago I wrote about how I sing improv for Gwendolyn on a regular basis. Sometimes a song sticks well enough that I remember it from week to week. One of these is a song that I often sing to my daughter while she's having her bedtime bottle. It's a modification of Frere Jacques, sung to the same melody:

Seour Espoir,

Reveilles-tu?

Pourquoi pas dormis,

Toute la nuit?

My apologies for you true francophones out there: here is what I think I'm singing:

Sister Hope

Are you awake?

Why not sleep,

All night long?

~ emrys

In the Jordan

As I mentioned recently, we have a creek running through our property which provides aesthetic value to us and to most young visitors to our home. This little brook begins just uphill from our property in a pondy marsh; it ends about five hundred yards below our property, where it empties into the Susquehanna River. It’s a short body of water, of little note to most who drive past or over it.

But things become memorable when we have significant experiences with them. So it is with our little creek. Last summer, three young friends were visiting to do some construction. They had ridden to our house on their bicycles, so when it came time for them to depart, they hopped on their bikes and headed down the steep dirt road towards the main highway.

One of our friends lost control on the graveled curve and rode down a rocky slope into the forested creek. Judging from where I found his bike later, he nearly missed striking a few trees head-on—praise the Lord! Bruised and bloodied, he managed to climb up out of the creek to the road, by which time another of the youth had run back to our house. Meanwhile, a good Samaritan had picked up our victim and brought him back to our driveway. (Thanks to Joanne and the Spirit’s timing.) From there we called 911 and his parents.

In spite of a frightening amount of gore, he only needed a few stitches; more than a year later the signs of his accident do not in the least deprive him of his good looks. I daresay perhaps those slight scars will be marks of that strange pride we derive from surviving ordeals.

After retrieving his bicycle from the creek—which fared considerably better than our friend in the tussle with nature—I decided to name the creek after him. So the babbling brook that courses past our house is now Jordan Creek.

Congratulations, Jordan; I wish that getting one’s name into history did not require such suffering.

~ emrys