Shana has always said that when a tree falls, its time to move. Its happened at every place she's lived. It happened at the apartment where I first lived with her; the place on Warren St. where she took me in like a stray dog and rescued me from my flea infested hovel that was the Acme Building. Oh, the Acme Building - the original ancestor to this project, the first renovation, the failed renovation. It was me and my friend Bob. We were living at the job site, camping out (I literally slept in a tent on the floor) in the front room that was once a bar, and was eventually going to be our gallery. Meanwhile we were fixing up the back apartment, exchanging labor for rent. We had big plans. I remember we were going to do a gas station themed bathroom, complete with a urinal, a tile mosaic of the Mobil Pegasus and a shower head made from a modified gas pump nozzle. The project ended badly. There was standing water in the basement, and a whole ecosystem was evolving down there. There were any number of insects, including giant flies that we imagined to be a new species. One day I got up my courage and crept down to the basement. I was staring at a soggy cardboard box full of fiberfill when I noticed a movement. Suddenly one, then two, then three little heads popped up. Inside the box was a whole litter of baby opossums. Adorable as they were, they were contributing nothing to the project so they had to go. We took them down to the bike trail and set them free. I don't remember how we drove the mother out. The opossums were gone, but they had brought fleas, and this is what truly made the place uninhabitable. During this time, the landlord was nowhere to be found. He refused to return our phone calls and the fleas got exponentially worse. When the exterminator finally came he said that it was one of the worst flea infestations he had ever seen. I remember walking in to the house and just watching my white socks become instantly peppered by them. Meanwhile, the landlord had transferred his affairs over to Mickey Shanahan, the loose cannon who owned the bar across the street. Apparently there was miscommunication regarding our arrangement and he was now threatening to sue us for back rent. Shana, bless her heart, took pity on me and cleared out a room for me in her apartment on Warren St. I've often thought that if it wasn't for those fleas, we may have never gotten married.
And then the city came and cut down the tree out front. They said it was diseased and promised to replace it with a flowering crab. We waited, and the crab never arrived. It was time to move.
Hearing of the demise of the Acme project, the landlord that I was working for offered me a proposition. He had an old Riverwest cottage that was badly in need of repair. By now I was working primarily as his finish carpenter and he had begun to trust my design sense. He proposed that I design and renovate the cottage and Shana and I could move in when it was completed. I would offer my labor at a discount in exchange for cheap rent. I was feeling highly reluctant after the experience at the Acme Building. I felt that accepting the offer would just be setting myself up for another failure. If there was one thing I should have learned from the Acme Building, it was not to get into some harebrained deal with another landlord. I decided to run the idea by Shana anyway. I was pretty sure she would be against it. I knew she was skeptical of the neighborhood, and I didn't think that she would trust me to pull it off after the Acme debacle. To my surprise, she went for it. And we went from this...
...to this...
There was a tree out front. It was a pear tree. For several years it produced bountiful numbers of pears, some of which Shana made into excellent pear sauce. The rest were eaten by squirrels or composted. The tree had never been properly pruned. It was badly misshapen, and much too tall for a fruit tree. But we loved it. The squirrels loved it. The birds loved it. We loved the birds. We had mixed feelings about the squirrels. And the tree created a barrier between us and the rest of the world. Beyond it were scores of typical Riverwest rentals; frame houses covered haphazardly with layers of asphalt, vinyl and aluminum siding. They were eyesores, and the more I learned about restoration - the more I could see how these houses were supposed to look, the uglier they became to me. Every time another clapboard house was stripped of its architectural details and covered with vinyl siding, I took it as a personal insult. The tree kept all this at bay. I could look out my window and the first thing that would draw my attention would be the tree, or the birds and squirrels that made use of it.
One fall day we heard a crash. We looked outside to find that the pear tree had lost one of its major limbs. It had caved under the growing weight of its fruit. On closer examination we noticed a line of sawdust trickling out of a hole in the trunk, building up in a mound at its base. A colony of ants was hollowing out its center, and the tree began its decline. After that, we lost about one major limb per year and eventually it became evident that the the whole tree would soon go, and it would likely take out my fence and porch railing in the process. We had the tree removed...and we started noticing For Sale signs.
Occasionally I would run across a house for sale that looked somewhat promising and I would check it out and report back to Shana. Inevitably, she would ask, "Is there a tree?" The answer was usually no, or there was a tree, but it didn't look very healthy, or there was a tree in the neighbors yard that at least would provide some shade for our yard. Then I spotted a house a few blocks from the bluff that looked like a tiny old farmhouse plopped down in the middle of the city. I imagined that when it was built it was surrounded by forest. It was painted pink and somehow this seemed perfect for it. It was tucked away behind a couple of cedars that covered most of the facade. In the backyard, there was a small fruit tree. In the yard next door, there was a massive white oak. At first I saw this as an asset, but upon closer examination, I noticed that there was severe deterioration at the base of the trunk. Its years were numbered, and I imagined that our time at that house would correspond to the lifespan of that oak tree. It was a ticking clock, a tragedy waiting to happen, and it made me very uncomfortable. We toured the house and discovered that its proportions were just too cramped. I could barely stand up in the upstairs bedrooms. It turned out that my boss had once lived there. He called it the clown house, (I can't seem to get away from those damn clowns!) and it was painted pink then too. He said that it was horribly drafty in the winter time. So we kept looking.
When Shana first saw the For Sale sign in front of our house, the facade was almost completely obscured by foliage. She nearly passed it up before she observed that, behind the wall of green, there was a solid, brick bungalow. The next thing she noticed was that the backyard was entered through an arch made up of two ancient yew trees. There was a towering spruce tree in the adjacent yard. She was interested.
In many ways, this house seemed to be hiding when we got to it. Surely many prospective buyers were turned away by the mountains of clutter that occupied every room of the house, obscuring her finest details. A layer of crusty, alligatored shellac covered all of the cabinetry and woodwork in the kitchen. To an untrained eye, the place looked like a dump. Luckily I have seen enough projects from start to finish that I can recognize a place when it has potential.
A couple o f days before we closed on the house, Shana and I decided that we needed to get away, so we went up to the Zillmer trail in Northern Kettle Moraine, where we often go hiking. There was snow on the ground and it was a perfectly still day. The sun was shining. As we came up over a hill on a familiar trail, I noticed some movement up in the trees up ahead. The sound came a second later. A massive oak tree, probably a hundred and fifty years old, had chosen that moment to fall, just as we came upon it. No wind had stirred it, no lightning had struck it. It just simply gave way amidst the silence of that calm day; its time had come.
Now we are pruning, and our bungalow is coming out of hiding. We are fortunate that the property is well endowed with greenery. In the back, beyond the archway of yews, there are two tall cedars. In the adjacent yards there are spruces on both sides and a giant maple. In the front yard is a pair of juniper bushes, a yew tree and a yew bush. At one point the realtor suggested to the seller that he do some pruning to expose the facade, and he lopped off the tops of the junipers. At first we thought that they were too far gone and that they would have to be removed. Unsure of our pruning skills, we consulted our friend John who used to work as a landscaper. On visiting his house, I was delighted to see that he had developed an obsession with bonsai trees. He had probably 75 bonsai trees in and around his house. This was perfect, because I had a secret hope that I could turn the front yard into a sort of Japanese garden. He encouraged us to be bold with our pruning and we set about creating our third giant pile of brush to line the curb.
Pruning the junipers was an act of sculpture in the most traditional sense. It involved selectively removing material, standing back and observing the results from multiple angles, then adapting to the results, sometimes taking broad strokes, hacking off a major limb, sometimes making subtle alterations with a pruning shears to refine the shape, working towards an overall gestalt; a finished statement that exists as a unified whole. It is pure abstraction, a dance between artist and material. Here again, Shana and I are collaborating, and we expose the trunks and refine the foliage into multiple, distinct tiers with space in between. Our zen garden begins to emerge. Standing back, there seems to be a missing element in the composition. Theres a open space on the ground between the tall yew and the juniper on the right. I think it needs a stone... a big one. I'm thinkng like a foot and a half high. I'd like it to come from a place of significance; maybe the twenty acres up in Iola that my grandfather owned before passing it on to his children, or maybe the Mines of Spain on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi where Shana and I were married. I have no idea how I'll move this stone. I'll find the stone first, then I'll figure out how to move it.
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