My House Habitats

Just so I can frame the story correctly, I have to talk about my parents divorce. It happened during my freshman year of college, with a somewhat abrupt announcement over thanksgiving dinner. I was upset, but mostly for my brother and sister who still lived at home. I thought about how much we were going to miss our childhood house. It was located within the city limits, but it was surrounded by tall-old oak trees and built comfortably into a hill. The house had a tin roof, which amplified the sound of rain and falling acorns. The house wasn’t new and didn’t have central air, so during the summer all the windows would be open and there would be a refreshing breeze. The shade of the oaks helped lower the temperature in the humid Baltimore summers. The house had a pleasant smell of moist wood and felt trapped in time.

After the split, my mother rented an old farmhouse on the edge of the growing suburbs. It had a whitewash barn with rusted latches and an abandoned chicken coop in which the wood floors were rotting away. Inside the house, none of the floors were horizontal; a pen placed in the middle of the room would roll to the far wall. There was barely enough space to get up the steep slippery steps without hitting our heads or sliding down on our butts. The whole structure felt like it was slowly sinking into the ground. It was great. The backyard was filled with trees and overlooked currently worked and retired fields. We would see foxes, white-tailed deer, hares, hawks, and owls. My mother picked the house because of its organic and lived in feel; like the feeling of holding a smooth heavy clay bowl, that is just the right size to curl between your hands. Things feel as if they fit together, and that things are connected, solid, and real. In this way the house felt more natural (like the previous house, I share my mother’s taste in this matter) than many of my friends.
I spent a good chunk of my summer break cleaning out the loft of the barn to utilize as a painting studio. I remember the first time I went exploring up the creaky ladder, the one dust covered window let in defined beams of evening light that traced their way across the room on suspended spider webs. The space had become a type of junk storage many years earlier and was filled with old abandoned furniture, metal toy soldiers, paper dolls, wasp nests and the remains of faded-orange ladybugs. The space made a very unique place to work, but I only completed one painting before I had to rush back to college in Boston.

Over the course of the next fall, to my dismay, the landlady decided to sell the land to contractors. She sold the house, the small forest behind surrounding it, and the cornfield across the street to feed the suburban growth craze. Everything was going to be leveled. I guess we should have seen it coming, just a few miles down the street a successful housing development had gone up a new CVS Drug and probably a Wal-Mart had recently opened their doors, complete with their expansive, freshly pored parking lot, which appeared as a mirage after driving through the open fields. The distance to the site of the old farmhouse was just far enough to build large brick million-dollar homes with five bathrooms and a pool for the rich to live away from it all but still close to convenience. Suburban sprawl is spreading over the landscape, engulfing places that seemed to have set up a new equilibrium with nature. There are many organisms that have adjusted to the farm life, that are not ‘farm animals’, as in birds, insects, plants. It may not be primary growth, but the land is slowly regaining viable habitat for a diverse number of creatures.

The unrestricted growth of the suburbs, just like cancerous cells in the body, are invading healthy human-nature areas and rapidly acquiring new mutations that make them more virulent. The suburbs are able to recruit utilities to feed the growing need just as tumors become able to recruit blood vessels and grow in size. The expansion becomes independent of living in one location and the suburbs metastasize, spreading the gross mass development to new areas and slowly taking over. But chemotherapy will not bring back the old farmhouse and my loft studio in the barn. We didn’t catch it soon enough for it to be operable.