I used to live in a house older than the country.
It was built around 1744, give or take. It’s in Chappaqua, NY, and is known as the Thomas Dodge House.
It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that by the time America declared independence, that house had already been standing for more than thirty years.
When we lived there, we renovated it, but tried not to sand the soul out of it, which was harder than it sounds. The floors sloped. The beams had their own ideas. Doors didn’t always close the way doors are supposed to close.
At first, we noticed all of it. Eventually, we stopped seeing those things as problems.
That’s what an old house taught me: the difference between wear and neglect. Neglect is ignoring the roof until it leaks. Wear is a floor that has held family after family for almost three hundred years.
One is a problem. The other is a privilege.
People lived there before us. Just like they did, we fixed what had to be fixed and left enough alone that the house still felt like itself.
