Not long after I returned to Minnesota from Eastern Pennsylvania, I met a fellow from the Red Lake Reservation. They acquire a nickname when they are young, and it sticks with them for their entire life. They are things like Booger and Duck Soup. I know him only by his nickname. It would quickly identify him if I used it, so I will call him Bill. Bill and I would get together and talk about all sorts of things. One day we talked about how if we stop and look around – there are amazing things to see. The strange way a tree had grown into what looked like two arms raised when some accident had sheared off its top. There were the little things too. Looking down on a dirt road and finding an agate.
The surprising things weren’t all in nature, either. We talked about a house on the town’s main street that looked like it had turrets from a castle. When our talk turned to the small things, he told me that he wanted to show me something in an abandoned house. I have to stop and explain something here. The Red Lake Reservation is about 35 miles north of our town. The tribe ran a service for people to get from the reservation to town and back. If it got too late, you would have to wait until the next day. Bill didn’t mind sleeping outside, but it was raining or cold in the winter, he had some places he could go. Bill took me to one of those places.
It was an abandoned house. The house smelled of rotting wood and too long without loving care. However, someone had loved it. There had once been beautiful wallpaper now stained by the leaky roof. The only thing left in the house in terms of furnishings was a woodfired cookstove in the kitchen. The oven was open. The door to it lay broken on the floor. Bill told me to look around the kitchen and see how plain it was. He then took me into what was probably the living room, or maybe back then – they would call it a parlor. Bill pointed to the moldings around the doors. They were wide and intricate designs adorned them. Much love had gone into building the house but a home. Next, Bill got down on his hands and knees in the corner of the room and motioned for me to join him.
There in that corner was what we might think of as a finial, but Bill told me it looked like something you’d find on top of the castle. I had to agree. It was a top where the moldings around the floor joined in the corner. However, it was three-dimensional and not cut as we might do it today with two flat sides to fit in the corner. The picture you see is the best I could find online that looked close to it. I marveled at whoever had taken the time to do those little corner decorations in three dimensions. They had to been made on a lathe and then carved. Bill told me he had first seen them one morning when he woke up after sleeping on the floor. He said he might’ve missed him had he not been down at their level.
It wasn’t long after that that the fire department burned down the house for training. I wish I had taken pictures of its beautiful moldings. I didn’t much to my regret. I guess you could say the love that went into building that home is no longer visible. Only this blog shows that it once lived.
