Dream Houses

The first house my parents owned sat on 50 acres of land along the road between Stedman and Panama in Chautauqua County, New York. This is the road where my father had us harvest hundreds of burger patties that fell off of a meat truck. He gave us each a galvanized metal bucket and had us pick them up while he watched us from inside the house with binoculars. I was probably 5 or 6, and it seemed like another thing one was expected to do, like picking blueberries, tomatoes, or apples.

The burgers cooked up pretty well, once you picked off the bits of gravel and grit.

We had lots of grit in that house, with its coal furnace in the dirt floor cellar. The building sagged at the back end and had to be jacked up so that it would not collapse. The floors were so slanted we could let a matchbox car go at one end of a room and it would run downhill and hit the opposite wall. When my mother cleaned she threw sudsy water at one end and let it flow down the length of the painted floor.

Half of the upstairs was unfinished, serving as our attic. It was a storage place filled with stuff stacked, jumbled—and fascinating. I remember beehive trays with chunks of wax honeycomb still in them, along with the crank operated device used to extract the honey. There were home grown tobacco leaves hung to dry, old furniture, big glass carboys for making wine or root beer, an easel with paints, along with brushes and supplies for my mother’s decoupage trays.  This was the clutter of my parents’ myriad projects.

In the other half of the upstairs were our bedrooms. My brother and sister and I slept in one room, and our parents in another. I remember few of the dreams that I had in that house, but I do remember one where I walked into the attic and found a door that I had not noticed before. Behind the door was a spectacular, colorful playroom loaded with all kinds of toys.

Then I woke up. There was no room of toys. The slanted wooden house was the same and so were the barn, the chicken coop, the kennel, the pond, the pasture on the side of the hill, and the many acres of woods.

Jumping way forward…

My second year of college I moved into the Caroline Ladd Pratt House, a dorm that was once a mansion belonging to the Pratt family.  17 of us lived in the house. We were members of an experiment to restore the house. It was certainly down at the heels. Purportedly abandoned in the 60’s and used as a shooting gallery by druggie squators that burned the furniture in the fireplace.

Pratt house was a wonderful mess. My first year there I shared an enormous room with another student, a painter. We filled the room with plants, and found furniture. I still have a chair that I found on the street in Brooklyn while I lived at Pratt House.

I remember a dream that I had about that room. In the dream several friends were admiring the space and telling me how lucky I was. I agreed that it was very nice, but said that I wished there were even more space. One of the visitors pointed to a corner of the room and said “What about that?” I looked and saw a gap where the two walls should have come together. I walked over to it and pushed on one of the walls and it swung as if it were on giant hinges, opening out onto a vast garden that presumably had been there all the time. My sense was that this garden was now mine and I could walk freely between the interior and exterior space.

In my many years of apartment living in New York, I know I’ve had quite a few of these dreams where I discover additional space, or realize that I have a big house that I did not know I had. It always feels exhilarating and wonderful...

...then I wake up. 

To follow-up on "Dream Houses", the crooked house on burger road was demolished around 1972 to make way for an off-ramp as Route 17 was extended over Chautauqua Lake. While many people were upset about a bridge over the lake, 

I think my parents were happy to have New York State buy the house. 

This Google map image shows the former location of the house.