Dog House by Carol Prisant

used to Blue’s appearance and disposition and tried very hard to accommodate those few of her peculiarities that were either likable or nondestructive, it hit me like a brick one day. Her English breeder had taken big-time advantage of our purported American naïveté as well as our distance from wherever she lived in Oddogshire to ship us—not merely the runt of the litter but her single unsalable pup.
    Had we been had?
    We missed our Cosi even more.
    Though we tried to make the best of Blue. We’d always been inveterate glass-half-fools.

    Time drifted by, maybe even another year, during which we made genuine and satisfying progress on the house. We patched and cleaned and waxed the wood floors, cut down dead trees, stopped that seepage in the basement (cleaned the gutters!) and hired a weirdly suited-up exterminator to take a beehive out of our attic; a beehive that was unquestionably, the fellow reported to us with some pride, the largest hive he’d ever seen in any inhabited living quarters. Some fifty pounds, as I recall (about the weight of a year-old bear). When he left, I spent the afternoon cleaning gob-bets of lovely sticky honeycomb off the attic floor, shoveling them into black trash bags and washing the old pine boards. I adore honey and would have eaten all those remnants on the spot had they not been studded with hundreds of dead, poisoned bees.
    Now that the honeybee is in dire straits, of course I’m filled with retroactive remorse. Should we have smoked the hive and carried it outside? Should we have left it to flourish and sealed off that room? Should we have put on veiled hats and elasticized suits and become beekeepers? Should we have lived in a buzz of mutual amity? Will I ever do right by Mother Nature?

    Although our house had been constructed in the early 1860s, we discovered photos taken in the 1880s, and poring over these, we were able to begin, slowly, to return bits of the structure to what each once looked like. Hand-chamfered wood railings replaced wrought iron on the porches. We’d already returned the decorative open spandrels to the upper corners of the porch roof supports when we belatedly discovered these were beloved of barn swallows, which may have been why they’d been boarded up to begin with. We even installed a reproduction of the old roof cresting. A kind of “icing” around the top of our house, this was basically an architectural fillip, but terrifying to install. Millard had cleverly re-created it by first making a casting of a segment we’d found at a flea market and then, at his plant, reproducing eighty or so feet in aluminum. We were starting to have fun.
    One day, through the careful research and good offices of a neighboring preservation buff (which we were inadvertently becoming ourselves), we discovered that a rendering of our house had once appeared in the 1860s equivalent of a design magazine, and in the text accompanying its proud architect’s own engraving of his vision, he’d set out his hopes for how the interior might be finished.
    If his creation had ever looked that way, it utterly didn’t now, but preservationists that we were and following his directions, we tried our best to finish his house for him. We painted the faux stone walls in the hall. Millard held the straight edge and I painted, though we quickly discovered that I lacked his steady hand. So I held the straightedge and Millard painted. (And that’s why a good one-third of the front hall’s “stones” looked hand-hewn while two-thirds looked machined.) I spent weeks on the faux-grained woodwork, making a point of continuing the whole onto the second floor, because I’d read somewhere that most graining was confined to main floors because the majority of nineteenth-century homeowners couldn’t afford to have all of the house grained. I didn’t want anyone to think we were only about show (and with DIY, after all, we