Left Behind

As a person endlessly intrigued by change and the passage of time, of course ruins and abandoned places are favorites.

Abandoned Southeast is a local account I follow – you can get them on all the socials. Last night, this video caught my eye on the FB feed. He’s exploring the now-vacant home (I assume with permission, since it’s for sale) of a local architect who died in 2017.

He never directly identifies the properties, unless they are publicly known, but it only took a little bit of digging to figure out that this is the house – and the contrast between his video and the real estate listing is..interesting.

(The house is listed for almost 3 million, which is not a lot for some of you living in places like California, but it is a lot for an abandoned home, no matter how historic, here in the Birmingham area – the price, I’m sure, is all about the land – almost ten acres right in the middle of a very prosperous area. )

More photos and more information on the history of the house and the architect.

I do love the Mid Century aesthetic, but this house doesn’t appeal to me at all, except for the fact of a courtyard. Love a courtyard. This actually slides more into “1970’s clubhouse” vibe in my mind. Cedar siding doesn’t age well, and the interior is cavernous, cold and plain, but not in a “here’s a palette, let your imagination make it your own” kind of way. The photos of the place in use look better, but given the current state of the property and the challenges in making it a useable, livable space, I can’t see how this will be purchased for its own sake, and not simply for the value of the property.

What a sad thing that would be!

Would it?

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The tension between the old and the new, the dying and just-born is endlessly interesting to me, because it’s the reality we all live in, even if we’re not the heirs of a dated, fading mansion.

Every moment of our lives is the product of history. Every word we utter has been learned, every interaction occurs in a framework of memory.

What do we retain, what can we let go of? What must we let go of? What will leave us anchored, but free for the present moment?

I write about this often, don’t I? As I explore secular and religious history, as I consider Catholic Conflicts – all of which seem to revolve around this issue – as I spend decades, it seems, sorting through what has been left to me by a deceased mother, a deceased father and a deceased husband.

You hang on to quite a bit at first, because it seems necessary to keep remembering and to let go of remembering via this vase or that book or those knick-knacks is an act of disrespect, is a signal to the deceased that they are forgotten, that they don’t matter any more.

That’s not sustainable. You can’t carry everything that your family and other connections have lived with forever, the rest of your life. That’s just impossible.

But neither can you forget. You can’t “leave it all behind” because that means you’ll be leaving yourself behind.

So to live in the present, respectful of the past but not burdened by it? How?

That seems to me a key to spiritual wholeness, and how we treat the objects we inherit can be expressive of our inner disposition. The healthy place is neither casual dismissal or mournful clinging. The healthy place prioritizes the present, informed by, but not controlled by the past.

And when you shake loose, you might be surprised to find how faulty your understanding was all along.

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Long, long ago, I inherited a formal dining room set. It had been in my great aunt and uncle’s house in Sanford, Maine. They’d raised my mother, and so she and her brother were the heirs when the Desjardins died in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I ended up with the dining room set which I had been brainwashed told for years was some kind of super-valuable piece being, as it was emphasized, a “solid mahogany” antique.

So I carted this set around as I moved around, from Florida to Indiana, then down here to Alabama. Table, chairs, buffet. Big buffet.

It was fine. It worked. It was free.

But I never really liked it much. Bulky, heavy and dark.

When we first moved here, we were in an apartment, and there was no room for the buffet, so I stored it.

Then I bought a house – a 1920’s bungalow, and I decided that I didn’t want the dining set. Any of it. It didn’t fit in the new house, either size-wise or aesthetically.

But I was scared. Not because I was attached, but simply because I didn’t want to offend my dad. My mother was long dead, and it wasn’t his side of the family’s stuff, but he was very attached to Uncle and Auntie, and the whole Maine Experience (a month every summer, etc) was one of his more formative adult memories, and for so long he had made such a big deal of the “solid mahogany” set that I was so lucky to have

Then two things happened. Then a third

First, I started watching Mad Men, as did my oldest son. One night he called me and he said, “Hey! Did you see? The Drapers have your dining room set!” Sure enough, they did. Huh.

Then, I started going to estate sales. And wow, if I didn’t see my precious, rare solid mahogany dining set in every other sale I went to. And I finally looked it up, and yes, it was mass-produced, not rare, not precious at all.

But there was still…Dad. What would he say? He’d gone to all that trouble back in the early 90’s hauling the stuff down from Maine with his friend John Hahn, and it was so important to him and he was so proud. I didn’t want to offend him, did I? To lead him to think that work and that inheritance wasn’t appreciated?

But still – I just didn’t want it anymore. So girded my loins and sold it: the buffet to a guy who said his wife would love it for a TV stand and the dining room set to a woman who was helping her daughter set up house in an older historic home where it would work.

And then my dad came to visit. I had a new table – my preferred style of light wood slab with a metal base from World Market – and no buffet, but the piano in the room. I was nervous. What would he say?

You guessed it:

He didn’t say a thing.

And not in the “He didn’t say a thing because he was so mad and didn’t want to start anything” sense. But more in the “He didn’t even notice” sense or even “He noticed, but didn’t care because it wasn’t as important to him as I’d assumed.”

All that stress – unbelievable now that I think about it – for nothing. For an inheritance that was useful and nice for a time, but had outlived its value to me, and that had been, apparently, completely forgotten by a person to whom I’d assumed cared a lot. But didn’t.

Or this:

You finally get down to it and just clean out that basement or closet of goods and relics that were so important to your parents, to you growing up and you find – well, you don’t actually miss the stuff. And the fact that it’s no longer even in your house or possession – doesn’t make a bit of difference to your life, as it turns out. You are still you, the past still happened, and it still lives where it has been – in the past.

Once in a while, you might think, Oh, I wish I had kept that colorful paper-mache cat from the early 70’s – that would be nifty to have now – but then you buck up and say, well, that’s that and move on.

You discover that no, the people are not forgotten, but also that keeping all the stuff hadn’t, in the end, kept them actually alive either. They are still gone, and the years are still flying by. It’s almost your turn.

I’ve often thought that some of our issues with grief and letting go are more related to our anticipation of our own demise more than anything else. To move on, to choose joy and life is hard, mostly because, of course, we do miss those who are gone, and it can seem to be a sign of some sort of disrespect. But I think, deep down, we also worry: If my life can go on and even be great after this person I loved died, does that mean they’re not missed? Does that mean…I won’t be missed after I’m gone?

Do I matter?

And the hint that life will indeed, go on, and people will have a great time without us and will eventually not think about us very much can be sobering, humbling and even a little scary.

Do I matter?

Some of the comments on that livestream video of the Woehle residence are along the lines of how could this happen? Are there no heirs to take care of this? Don’t they want it?

That’s always the question with the abandoned places and the ruins. What happened? There was life here, this place emerged from a strong, vibrant creative vision, flourished, was featured in the press, was known and enjoyed, and now you can barely see the leaf-filled pool through the fogged, dirty windows, and it will probably end up being torn down.

Does what I’m spending so much time and energy on right now matter? If this is what happens?

The right answer?

Yes.

But also:

No.

Welcome to Lent, the place where once again, we figure all that out: what we have, what we need, what we can let go of – and what we must let go of, because in the end – we have no choice.