First Car, First House and Clive the Farmer who Enchanted Me

Bill recently wrote a note to our circle of friends saying that their daughter moved out of Manhattan and bought her first car… a metallic blue Honda Civic. He described his first car, a Mustang bought new for $2,000 and asked about our firsts. Mine was a Chevy Vega, a cool blue sedan that I bought for $1900 to commute to my first job as a community health coordinator in Jackson, MI. My dad fronted my down payment and I  made payments of $50 from my salary of $9,600 per year.

A couple years later, my husband and I bought our first house, a three bedroom farm house which cost $17,000. We saved money from our move, we lived next door when the widow who lived their died and we made a deal with the family to purchase it. It was a deal even in those days.. a fixer upper per HGTV lingo.  We were the second owners and they hadn’t done much in improvements in the seventy years it stood. The area around it however had changed. The house represented the farmer’s last connection to that land, the family sold every other acre to developers in the twenty years prior to finance the farmer’s retirement. We owned the remnant of farmland that morphed into suburbia.

On the other side of our place lived a couple in their eighties who once were farmers, Clive and Lidia. They traded the farmhouse his father built for the small two bedroom next door to us.  Their daughter and son-in-law continued farming the land and raised their family. Clive enchanted me... an every-grandpa. He stood short, slightly bent, big shoulders and white haired. He said little but laughed a lot... well snickered like saying k k k k when something tickled him. He walked the perimeter of their small patch of back yard every day, as if he was the land owner of a doll house estate. Though he and Lidia shared harvests from the garden on the farm he also grew herbs around his yard in our neighborhood. Once Clive took me on a tour of smells of his garden, where he helped me experience lavender, horehound, lemon verbena and other mouth watering fragrances. I’ve grown some of those same herbs since, and more than once bewitched kids in the neighborhood with the magic of plants that I could make smell like lemon.

In our "farm house", we began improvements in the kitchen. Soon after moving in, we removed the nineteen drawers and doors from the kitchen, painted them with a gorgeous periwinkle blue thick oil based paint then realized they'd been individually crafted and the new paint completely made them impossible to determine where they belonged. We sanded them all down to bare bone, figured out where they fit, numbered them as a key for rehanging  and then repainted.

I learned how to put in a counter top from that remodel too. My father in law, Gus helped us build the base, cut the hole for the sink, roll out and glue the faux butcher block and glue an edging. Another time, our friend John came over and helped me tile the walls where we created a shower above what had only been a tub. I remember sitting on the edge of the tub, breaking up popsicle sticks to use as spacers and drinking beer after we figured out the rhythm and process of plumb lines, glue, popsicle sticks and tiles. 

We sold that house at a profit a few years later and bought a brand new house in a new subdivision. Of course, cars now cost as much as that first house and house payments cost as much as the car. When I consider home improvement projects now, I am  fearless when it comes to calling a handyman.