Saratoga News

Point of View

Carl Heintze

Blame the house on the hill for reflections

A week ago we spent three days housesitting. It was a disconcerting experience.

It wasn't the house itself which was disconcerting. It's on a hill not far from Healdsburg, in the heart of the Healdsburg wine country. Its grounds gently descend the hill to a swimming pool. From the front deck there's a view that reaches as far as Mt. Veeder in Napa County. Spruce and oaks abound. Flowers, carefully planted and tended, set off the yard.

It's not a new house--that is, it wasn't just built--but for the past year it has been done over by our friends as a retirement project. They've done a magnificent job.

The interior walls are all white, the exterior walls a blue gray. Monet prints and reproductions have been strategically placed. The furniture is mostly new.

Their extensive library lines one wall of a sitting room. The kitchen is filled with new all-white appliances, and the blue and white dishes match the decor. In the living room, a stone fireplace ascends to a cathedral ceiling. The entry is over a brick path lined with flowers and bordered by a birch tree. In short, it's beautiful.

We had the feeling that we had arrived in our own private bed and breakfast.

In between dips in the pool, we sat and talked about its wonders, how much work and care had gone into the redo and how wonderful it was just to sit and enjoy it. We even suggested to ourselves how we might have done it, had it been up to us to do so. Then, of course, we had to go home.

We've lived in the same house for almost 40 years, and our place--which is, of course, poolless, is not on any hill, has no spruce trees around it and looks out on the houses across the street--is beginning to show its age. There are, let's face it, pits in the kitchen linoleum; it's been awhile--well, actually quite awhile--since any of the rooms were painted, and even longer since the outside has had any paint applied.

We do have a new dishwasher, but the rest of the appliances have learned to grow old along with us and have various idiosyncrasies we have come to view, if not with affection, at least with understanding.

Having lived in it so long, we have sort of wrapped the house around us. It is as much us as we are it. We tend to think it's always been that way, but actually, of course, it hasn't. The house did grow around us.

We bought it with great trepidation and in some desperation, because our first house had only a single bathroom while we had three small children. The new house had (oh, joyous day) two bathrooms which helped ease the early morning crush.

Our children rapidly grew up to fill and then overflow the house. The two years or so when they were all adults and when there were five cars parked in front of the place--the garage was doubling as a fourth bedroom and a major storage area--made it seem as if things were bursting at the seams. And they were.

But we resisted the temptation to seek something larger.

Then suddenly all the children were gone, to reappear only briefly on weekends, first with college friends and then with their own families, and we settled back, relaxed and expanded to fill the vacant spaces. In all truthfulness, years later, we've now begun to push at the seams ourselves, just the two of us.

Sometimes the house does seem small and old--probably because it is--and it would no doubt be of major benefit to sell and move just to get rid of the accumulated debris we've gathered about us.

But that now seems difficult, if not impossible. There's just too much to lose. The house on the hill our friends fashioned probably is beyond our grasp. To divest ourselves of those piles of memory, some of which are really junk, is a task to which we don't aspire; neither, probably, could we accomplish it.

And yet wouldn't it be nice to start over again? Even at this late stage in life, to move to a new location in or near a new town, to jettison the forgettable parts of what has happened for a new approach to what's to come, to have a view, surely a view we would have earned by hard work and planning, to invest a new home with the best of what we have and the better parts of what we could afford; in effect, to be reborn.

That's what's disconcerting about housesitting.

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