The Conscious Being of the House

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"The house was quiet . . .
part of the meaning, part of the mind . . ."

The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

by Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)

********************
More memories
of 443 as shared by a previous resident,
Robert W. Topping (1925 - 2009)

Young Bob Topping
on Tricycle & Bicycle
Click to see more photos from the Topping Era

Please enjoy Bob's childhood recollecions,
interspersed with a few current - day photographs:
"The kitchen was a nightmare for a kitchen designer. It had two huge windows and the remnant of a chimney on the south wall; two doors,an exit and a door to the rather generous pantry on the west wall; a door to the dining room and one to the living room on the north wall (not to mention the north wall had an offset); and the east wall had doors to the basement and a back stairway to the second floor. All of those obstacles left barely enough room for a kitchen cabinet, a sink, a refigerator, and agas range, though somehow Mother seemed to make it all work. She produced a lot of goodies in it, as did my sisters, and sometimes even my father. He could produce a tasty meatloaf with a half pound of hamburger, a week's supply of lefovers from the refrigerator, and a couple of cups of stale bread crumbs from the bread drawers. I recall one meatloaf he made with leftovers that included leftover meatloaf. Haha!

"Upstairs, off the main hall, were three bedrooms: the south room occupied by my sisters, the north "study," occupied by each of us five brothers at various times, and the east room of my parents. Off the east room was a smaller room, called an alcove, which included two sizeable clothes closets and a dormer window as well as a white iron crib. It was the room which served a nursery for all four of mother's children. It was "my room" until I was about four or five. I had my "stuff" in a lower drawer in one of my parents' high - boy chiffoniers.

"The bathroom had two small walk - in closets, a clawfoot bathtub, and a large sink surrounded by a marble top and splashback, and also a dormer window, giving any occupant of the toilet a fairly grandiose western sweep of our backyard, garage, and Littleton Street beyond.

"The third floor -- we called it the attic -- was wide open until Daddy built two larger dormer style rooms with beds in each. That is where my brother Dale and I slept when we got older. In the Depression years, my folks took in students from time to time, and they lived on the third floor. They helped my mother with housework or did chores in the yard for room and board. I remember only two of those students, Louis and Ezra, the latter a French horn player in the Purdue marching band. My father may have been partial to horn players; both he and Grandpa Topping had played baritone horn in the Kanawaka Township Band back in the 1880s.

"The garage, by the way, was built by my father from the lumber he salvaged when he dismantled the barn that sat at the rear of our rather generous yard. I never saw the barn; it was torn down long before I was born, but it was not unlike others that still existed on our neighbors' properties when I was a tyke running about the neighborhood. Remember -- barns were the garages of the nineteenth century; horses were the principal means of transportation and barns supplied not only their housing but a place to store buggies, tack, and horse "fuel": hay and oats. *********************

One of the Topping boys
in front of the new garage
that Dad built

A view of the garage in foreground (looking east to west)
with the northbound neighbor's barn in the background
[frosty garage windows & fenceposts]

A panoramic view (left to right) of:
1. neighboring garage to the south
2. 443 plus big barn with hayloft
3. additional outbuildings to the north

"My father and mother were foragers; both had been farm kids when the pursuit of foodstuff was a daily, mainstream activity. Even the squirrels which abounded in our neighborhood, buried walnuts all over our yard. The yard was dotted with fruit trees my father planted: Montmorency cherry; several varieties of apple; pear, peach, even an apricot tree. The vegetable garden area which replaced the barn included a strawberry patch, a lengthy row of rhubarb, blackberry bushes, and even a gooseberry bush which today is probably an endangered if not extinct species. If you ask someone if they've ever eaten gooseberry pie, and they reply (with relish) that they have, you know they must have been born before 1932.

Topping Garage, Back of House, New Garage built in 2005

"Along the north line next to the neighbor's rapidly deteriorating barn was Father's pride and joy: A Concord grape arbor which produced neither wine -- heaven forbid! -- nor even canned grape juice, but case after case of twenty-four glass jars each of the finest, clearest grape jelly that my mother could produce or that I have ever tasted.

"The jars of grape jelly were stored in our "fruit cellar" together with mother's pickle relish and canned peaches plus a seemingly endless supply of mincemeat which she and Daddy produced every fall from the ripened apples of a half dozen trees. There were also Ball Mason quarts of pie cherries picked from four or five trees by us kids. I remember it as one of the first family chores I engaged in."

Mincemeat!
A tradition we have carried on during our years at 443
-- except that ours is made from homegrown green tomatoes!

Additional House Posts
Talented Residents
Renovations
Christmas Fencepost
Vintage Fenceposts
Property Line
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, June 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ 443 Photos: "Historic" & "Current"
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogsppot.com

Over a Hundred Years of Living

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"What have you seen in your hundred years?"
[Additional Contemporary Photos]

Memories of 443 as shared by a previous resident,
Robert W. Topping (1925 - 2009)
"The house at 443 Robinson Street needed both repair and paint when my parents and their three sons (aged 13, 7, and 4) moved into it in 1911. Grandpa Topping and Dad's wealthy Long Island aunts loaned him the money to buy the place -- the only residence Mother and Dad ever owned and my only childhood home.

Young Bob Topping on Robinson Street
Click to see more photos from the Topping Era

"Robinson Street was the main north - south thoroughfare on the extreme east side of West Lafayette, or at least east of Salisbury Street. It curved northwesterly up grade from the North River road, probably an original cow path traversing the clay - and - gravel bluffs along the west bank of the Wabash River meandering generally west and south as the natural division between Lafayette and West Lafayette.

"Our property comprised about three - fourths acre and lay about thirty to forty feet (I judge) above the Wabash flood plain and overlooked the river and most of Lafayette, especially a nondescrpt industrial building that sat like a dirty loaf of bread nearly along the river's edge with high, easily read letters that spelled "Lafayette Ice & Coal Company" on its west wall. Later, after the end of Prohibition, the sign was repainted a tawdry yellow with huge red letters trimmed in black that read "Home of YE TAVERN BREW." It advertised the local brewery that beer drinkers joked about. . . . Dad hated the sign and complained between clenched teeth that his view of the Wabash Valey and Lafayette was obstructed by the largest, ugliest monster ever . . .

"Built in 1896, probably by a retired Tippecanoe farmer, our house was a three - story, massive - looking, white clapboard edifice classed as Queen Anne style architecture. From its outside, you saw a long sloping roof up to a ridge pole and on the northeast corner, a three - sided cupola and a red - brick chimney that vented a handsome Italian marble tile parlor fireplace that Dad and Mother never used. "Could burn the place down," Dad would say. Built on a high foundation with a rather shallow, brick - floor basement, the house also had a broad front porch; and since the lot sloped from rear to front, one had to climb seven wood steps to the porch and front door but only two at the screened back porch. There was also a north porch entry to the living room.

"Inside, the house boasted the aforesaid parlor, a front hall and a two - landing oak banistered, open stairway to the second floor, a living room,and a dining room. The front hall was impressive, its main feature the polished banister that frequently warmed the seats of the pants of all five Topping male offspring who believed its purpose was for sliding. But most impressive were the front hall bookcases. Three rows of glass fronts displayed the complete works of Mark Twain and most of those of Charles Dickens, several volumes of Victor Hugo, and Shakepeare, and one high book case that contained volume after volume of the Proceedings of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. A halltree (we called it) held hooks for coats and hats and the seat was a lid beneath which we kept an assortment of knit hats, scarves, and gloves for winter. The odor of mothballs in it could knock you over. A smaller closet under the second stairway landing held more coats plus the family vacuum cleaner. . . . "

A few alterations, but you can see it just as Bob describes!

I want to share more of Bob's Robinson Street reminiscences, but for right now, I must stop to insert this poem whose opening stanza connects perfectly with the image of the Topping brothers sliding down the banister (or, as poet Linda Pastan writes:
" . . . the lovely children of earth
who run up and down the stairs so lightly . . ."

To An Old House

What have you seen in your hundred years?
If asked, what would you say,
Of the dozen families that lived in your walls,
Of the hundreds of children at play?
Did the boys slide down the bannister rail,
To a mother’s angry scolding?

How many laughs, and how many tears
Have marked the years unfolding?
Every time a floorboard creaks,
The sound tells a story.
A hundred summers in their heat,
A hundred Christmas glories.
Here in this kitchen, a dozen mothers
Have left their stories behind.
Open the cupboards, look and see,
There a tale you’ll find.
Old recipe on yellowed paper,
Phone numbers scribbled on doors,
A catalog from ’65,
1950’s floors.
A hundred years of living,
These walls have seen each day.
A dozen families loved this place . . .

But memories linger in these walls,
And memories always will.
Do ghosts hide here, in your shadows?
Are there secrets, hidden well?
Oh, that you could only speak,
The tales that you could tell.
To walk your halls in quiet step,
Just listen, hear the story
That an old house can clearly tell,
In matchless oratory.
“I am the years gone by . . . "

by Rick W. Cotton© 2018

It's true!
Here at 443 we have those friendly ghosts who have left behind
their names and numbers -- saved from who knows how long ago?
Immortalized down in the basement, on the brick.

Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, May 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ "443 Historic House Photos"
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogsppot.com

May Day at Town & Gown

~ POSTING IN CELEBRATION OF MAY DAY ~
{On May 1st intead of April 28th}

~ A BISTRO WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS ~

Barely a week ago
the seed packets were scattered on the tabletop,
in anticipation of planting at Town & Gown;
but today: what to my wondering eyes should appear?
Seedlings!

In keeping with my friend Matt O'Neill's request for more Gerard Manley Hopkins, what could be more appropriate for May Day than these lines:

From "The May Magnificat":

. . . What is Spring?—
Growth in every thing—

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing . . .

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all . . .

~ G. M. Hopkins ~

And from Matt himself:

"May, bursting with the resurrected glory of warmer weather, brings a full menu of events rich in ritual and celebration to our college campus location. The Inn has absorbed these memories over the years like a faithful old family box camera, stacking the snapshots in the shoe box of its spirit: Mother's day and graduation receptions, wine tastings on the porches and in tents on the lawn, catered champagne suppers under the covered bridge by Cataract Falls, garnishing classes under the gingko tree in the university quadrangle, poetry readings in the James Whitcomb Riley Library, and recitals in Thompson Hall, the college's performing arts center.

"Food undergoes a final transition in lightness that began at the end of March. Indulgence in calories gives way to indulgence in clothes before June arrives to make a rumpled mockery of the most delicate outfits, prompting delicacies like poached salmon of pastel pink. A ribbon of lemen - yellow chardonnay, caper, and chive sauce, and translucent little new potatoes carved in the shape of plover's eggs with asparagus in red pepper rings complement this dish.

"May is a rush to plant a hundred flower boxes with pansies, petunias, impatiens, and vining vinca and to mulch the hill of colorful perennials in the back of the Inn. These are our efforts to provide a suitable backdrop to the parade of caps and gowns that bustle with such excitement, such elegance, such promise, and such hope on their way to life's fulfillment." [emphasis added]

From Chef Matthew O'Neill's poetic cookbook,
The Seasons at Walden Inn
Signature Recipes from an Elegant Country Inn (1997)

"Salmon of Pastel Pink"

"A Transition in Lightness"

"Such elegance, such promise, and such hope"

Once & Future Town & Gown Posts

May Day
All Felled

Spring Planting
night & day

gather
open
lattes
spiced coffee
whiskey
scenic views
autumnal ~ flora
leftovers

Previous ~ OPEN ~ Signs

Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, May 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Banana Arbor
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST ~ Bookmobile
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogsppot.com