House Lessons_Renovating a Life by Erica Bauermeister

Author:Erica Bauermeister [Bauermeister, Erica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9781632172440
Goodreads: 49435379
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2020-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

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IT IS PROBABLY FITTING that many houses in the United States are not attached to their foundations. We are a mobile population, after all. In 2007, the US Census Bureau calculated that the average American will move 11.7 times in their life, while Europeans will move only four times on average, according to a RE/MAX Europe study.

In this way, I am a completely typical American. I grew up moving. West to east to west. North to south to north. Not every year, but every five or so—an awkward length of time. I learned early the art of the quick setting down and pulling up of roots. I made friends, and then let them go. In that pre-Facebook time, I knew those friendships would never survive a life of hand-scrawled letters.

Perhaps that’s why as a general rule I remember the houses we lived in better than the people I knew. To this day, I am horrible at recognizing faces—but I can tell you the floor plan of almost any house I’ve ever been in. There is a mnemonic device developed by the ancient Romans called a memory palace. You take a building you know well, then mentally place each thing you want to remember within a specific room. The location helps you recall the memory. But for me, the building is the memory.

Ben, as you might suspect, had a different experience. He grew up in the same city for most of his life. He tends his friendships, and his network of contacts is legion. He is like one of those plants that you pull out of its pot to find there is no soil left, every bit taken up by roots. From the moment we met, I loved the centeredness of him. I wanted to be near it, and to have that for our future children. With each of their births I could feel a web forming between us. But it was when we lived in Italy that the concept of roots became a visual, tangible thing. I watched the love flowing down through the generations. You could almost taste it in the air. I wanted that for our family.

But here is where the irony of our current situation loomed large. In my desire to create a more family-oriented way of life, I was spending half my time away from my children and husband. And the stress was high enough that when something like the almost-fire happened, I saw only the risk that had come so near to our home. Just like when I was young, I kept focusing on the house, more than on the people within it. If I truly wanted a foundation for us, I knew that equation would need to change.

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