Dog House by Carol Prisant Page A

could be big spenders).
    In period-speak, we “gussied our house up.” And we did it all ourselves.
    Except for the hall tile. We didn’t lay tile.
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    And then we made a marvelous discovery.
    I was still addicted to reading the antiques trade papers, and one dull winter evening, stretched out on the living room floor, leafing through page after page of gray text and grainy ads, I came across an arresting full-page photo; an advertisement for a cast-iron birdhouse that looked, gee, very much like our house. The porches were in strange places and there seemed to be a bay window where we didn’t have a bay, but still ...
    â€œMill, take a look at this,” I said, sticking the paper under his pipe.
    My spatial relations had always been a running joke between us, but Millard snapped to attention.
    â€œThat’s our house! It’s definitely a miniature of our house.” He was really excited. “Call the dealer. See if we can buy it!”
    He actually wanted to buy something! He was so excited he spilled pipe ash down his sweater and burned a(nother) hole.
    I called immediately but was disappointed. We were too late. The dealer had sold the little cast-iron birdhouse almost immediately to another dealer. (Which, in case you didn’t know, is how the antiques world stays afloat.) Still, after I’d confided my improbable tale to him, and perhaps, because this particular dealer was one I’d known for years, he tried to buy it back for me.
    And whaddya know? He did.
    Which was how we came to own a cast-iron miniature of our own house—labeled by its maker and dated 1868. Not only that, but it appeared that we’d been making a nest for ourselves in perhaps the only extant piece of residential architecture in the United States with a signed and dated birdhouse in its likeness. Over time, for those who inquired, we invented the following romantic, almost-plausible backstory:
    Mr. Miller, a cast-iron maker in Providence who had until quite recently been engaged in making cannon for the North, was reading a shelter magazine in his foundry one day (I did say “almost”) when he turned the page and came across architect Frederick S. Copley’s engraved illustration of his “Model Suburban Cottage: In The Old English Or Modern Gothic Style.” And the enterprising Mr. Miller, who’d been looking around for some way to salvage the fortunes of his moribund cast-iron factory, said to himself, “Now wouldn’t that make a handsome, salable birdhouse?”
    He had a nose for the birdhouse business, did Mr. Miller, because he seems to have done quite well making multiples of our house, along with a number of other, perhaps not so successful, houses. At the Rhode Island School of Design, we found a Miller Iron Company catalog from which we learned that our house was the most costly model the company offered. New and painted white, it sold for ten dollars. Had automobiles been around then, it might have been “the Caddy of the line.” Unfortunately, however, because it wasn’t actually possible for Mr. Miller to see the rear of the house in the engraving, he got that part wrong. And later, when the traffic increased on our nearby road, one of our predecessors moved two of the porches, so we no longer matched the picture in the book. Clearly, though, it was our house.
    We never put our “own” birdhouse outside; we kept it indoors, safe from entropic rust and the depredations of Nature. But we did find another of the Miller birdhouses to put on a pole in the garden. You wouldn’t imagine that birds would actually want to live in a cast-iron house (hot!), but every spring, modest brown house sparrows nested in ours.
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    Meanwhile, though Millard and I were ashamed to admit it, Blue was increasingly turning out to be an unsatisfactory Cosi. After a mildly searching review of our consciences and hearts and an exercise involving some