An interesting, if somewhat unsettling, experience today. As you know, it doesn't rain, but that it pours. Having heard little or nothing for a very long time about the house and farm I moved from in Ten Mile, today three different people asked me about it and told me what had become of it. If you were never at that house, let me tell you about it.

My erstwhile husband (E.H.) was made redundant at the nuclear plant in Oregon, Trojan by name, when the company that owned the plant shut it down. After what seemed like a very long time, he was hired by Tennessee Valley Authority to work at the nuclear plant in Spring City, Tennessee, called Watts Bar. He came to Tennessee to begin working and to look for a place for us to live. I stayed behind in Oregon, continued to work at my law practice and waited for our house to sell. Providentially, our Oregon house sold reasonably quickly and we had cash in hand to buy a place in Tennessee. During the time he was here alone, E.H. found the property he really wanted to purchase in Ten Mile. When I came to Tennessee on what was billed as a "scouting trip", he showed me that property first, middle and last. I admit that he made a desultory effort to look at some others with me, but it was obvious what he wanted most to buy. An older house built 23 years before by the elderly couple who were selling it and about 85+ acres of land. We had horses and a pack of dogs at the time. We bought the property.

While I went back to Oregon to make ready to move our belongings (including the aforementioned critter menagerie), E.H. spent every nonworking hour he could at the "new" house, stripping it down to the studs and preparing to remodel the house completely. He also spent a huge amount of time and vast physical energy preparing the arena outside the barn and fencing the dog yard outside the shop up on the hill. I note in passing that the dog and horse stuff was finished before the kitchen ...

The work that had to be done by a builder and crew was completed before I arrived in Tennessee and the two of us, thereafter, did all the finish work. I painted every room in the house baseboards to and across the ceilings; we installed all the molding in every room; we installed the doors and did the rewiring and replumbing that was needed. The bathroom and kitchen were designed and installed from the wall studs out during that exceeding hot late summer.

In subsequent years we finished the daylight basement, installing interior walls, a lovely bay window, another bathroom (with all the modcons), a fireplace, we replaced all the windows, replaced interior doors, and all else needed to make it a house we could love and be happy in. Allow me here to insert an observation from an Elizabeth George novel: "She was, in short, a victim of the myth that has been foisted upon women since the time of the troubadours: Love conquers all; love saves; love endures." 


Let me cut this exegesis short by simply stating that E.H. came home one day after twelve years in that house and announced that he was running away with a ukulele player he had met at music camp. Odd, but true. And this brings me back around to the beginning of this minor dissertation.

Today three people asked me if I had been back up to the Ten Mile house. Two were friends from work who happened to have some sentimental reasons to stop by the place, as it abutted their extended family property and they had spent childhood days there fishing, hunting and generally being consumed by the golden haze of long-distant memories. The third was a law enforcement officer who was looming large in my kitchen while I was signing warrants for him. The gist of the stories all three told me was this; my lovely home has been vandalized to the point of becoming a fire hazard and eyesore and the local druggies are using the area down by the pond (so many fond memories of dogs, children, grandchildren and simple peace) to cook methamphetamine. I'm told that counter tops have been ripped out, there is no longer a front door on the house, wiring has been ripped out of the walls and there are squirrel nests in what's left of the kitchen cupboards. Holes have been punched in the walls and the cottage behind the house has been nearly destroyed. Everything that could be carried away has been. 


There was, of course, yet another story of how the house was purchased from me and then became part of a huge criminal conversion case covering a couple of counties. I believe the property now belongs to a benevolent society and they probably don't know what to do with it. I haven't been back up there since I moved out. Too many memories, good and bad. 


I was a bit surprised by my reaction to the intelligence today that my old home was now a complete shambles and being used for illegal activities. My first emotional response was, "What a fitting memorial to the end of my marriage." Curious to find that I still feel that strongly about it all these years later. This is not a dirge to that time in my life, nor a plaint about the characters involved (myself included). It is, rather, a surprised observation of how my quietly demented mind seems to work these days. There is a scene in the Kevin Reynolds film "Tristan and Isolde"  in which, after the illicit love affair is discovered and disaster follows, Isolde returns to the Roman ruins where she and Tristan had been so blissfully, if briefly, content with each other and finds that it has been completely destroyed and only ashes and stone are left. The destruction of the physical being a metaphor of the state of the emotional. I guess that's what the report of the destruction of my former home was to me today. Not simply destroyed by an 'act of God', but deliberately and disrespectfully vandalized. 


Lives develop in different directions. People change. Promises made can not be kept. Houses are destroyed. However, the sun continues to come up each morning. After the storm the rainbow continues to appear. After a while, pain subsides (even if it doesn't go away entirely). Someday I will be complete in myself. Someday someone will reclaim the Ten Mile property and new people will have new memories from it. 

"I think, after loss, life requires an act of reclaiming. You have to reject being overwhelmed. Life has to go on." (Vita Sackville-West)