Thoughts on the Highland House
It rains, a rare enough occurrence in arid Colorado. This morning though, looking up out the back door, the sky above is blue with only a few small clouds and still it rains right through the sunshine. The rain is magical here. Sitting at the kitchen table with my french press full of coffee I am enjoying the sound of rain immensely as it quenches the garden, bounces off the now shimmering leaves of the intoxicating mock orange tree and pours here and there out of downspouts onto such surfaces as the brick patio, the questionably legal water barrel and our struggling lawn.
Now my rather romantic rainy reverie is broken by the alarm I set for the loaf of rye bread I popped in the oven an hour ago.
The rain is too ephemeral. It’s already done and small white butterflies flit about the mock orange to the tune of an occasional soft drip. The garden here is wild and in desperate need of weeding to the eye of a gardener, but I generally leave it to be as is, not fully sure how much ownership to take of a place I’ve only lived in for a month. Oh but what a place! To begin with, there is a garden, four large raised veggie beds off to one side of the back yard which is itself dominated by one large pear tree, two other fruit trees still staked in their youth and an enormous mock orange, now, just at the end of its bloom. To either side there are more trees, old and enormous having been planted on Mapleton Hill no doubt in the early 1900’s: Silver Maple, Linden, Blue Spruce, Ceder… and Elder. I’ve only ever know Elder as a medium sized shrub, though in lore it has this Crone like wise and slightly dangerous character, the Elder Mother. This one here is friendly to my eyes but certainly wizened and large, reaching easily 30 feet in height and spread. This lady lives on the East side of the house and exudes her own heady scent at the very height of her bloom so as not to compete with the earlier, sweeter, mock orange.
Now comes the whistles of hummingbirds.
The house itself; painted blue bricks and sprinkled with stained glass windows in no particular pattern, faces south on Highland Street at 6th Avenue in Boulder, Colorado. The kind of house with a hundred wonderful places to sit; this nook, that cranny, the large covered front porch or the wood panelled and warm living room are all good. I could lounge by the out of tune piano in either the African printed couch I brought here myself, or the old stuffed leather chair. That room makes me think of expatriates, and seems to beg for some kind of savannah dwellers head on a plaque. There is the meditation room to sit in; it offers a floor, cushions optional. The kitchen is always a good place to sit, not to mention a good place to stand and cook. There are chairs and logs upon which to seat oneself in the back yard, a couch upstairs on the landing between the two stairs and any number of other window wells, chairs, bedsides or branches that you could install yourself on for a spell. Myself, I have left the kitchen with coffee in tow and taken up residence for the time being in the atrium. Between the expatriate piano salon and the living room there is a sunken pebbled area with a flagstone waterfall feature and skylights to complement its tall windows. Nearly every surface is home to some houseplant or other contained by a wide array of pots. In here among the plants is another overstuffed chair, upholstered in purple and shoved into the side where there is a space, if not quite enough. My shoulders are sharing the space with some kind of palm on the right and above my head the skylights offerings are dappled through what’s maybe a fig. I am not knowledgeable about houseplants, but they make for fine companions on a Sunday morning such as this. The atrium makes a kind of screen between the aforementioned rooms, and on one side serves as a hallway and communal library. The books seem to have been arranged not alphabetically but by predominant colour. At the top left is the black shelf, bedside it to the right a white shelf. Clockwise around there are a half green, half yellow shelf and then a red shelf. Below that; brown to the left and blue to the right. Moving down from there the system of organization seems to dissolve into odds and ends.
Now the sky has dimmed again and distant rumbling suggests the rain may not be quite done with us yet. The skylights above are streaked with a few drops and there is a faint tapping.
This house is a walk of mere minutes to reach the trailheads into the foothills, or the heavily foot trafficked Pearl St. Mall. It is surrounded by the wealthy of Boulder on all sides and their immaculate homes and gardens; this place though is a little oasis of weeds, both the garden variety and the social. As a garden resident I would consider myself to be a weed. Not a stately flowering shrub, nor showy annual. I am not a carefully bred perennial, nor an intentionally placed piece of statuary. I am a volunteer; I arrive, sometimes uninvited, sometimes planted with the idea of making tea or seasoning. I quickly establish myself in the cracks or corners where there is room to breathe. Sometimes I get out of hand and push others out of their comfort zones, if allowed to take root I will do so deeply, and there will be no getting rid of me. These are the people in society that find the places where change is needed and apply themselves to the pressure points. This house is a haven for weeds in the middle of a classical garden.
This house is the kind of place you could only find yourself living in through a series of remarkable synchronicities. I kind of marvel to find myself here and at the same time I feel that there is no place else I could possibly be, a part of me has maybe always been here? However it is, this is where I am and am supposed to be I am certain of that. It is a house for being, dreaming and restoring: A place to find one selves center amidst the chaos. The circumstances of my own life of late have certainly felt like chaos, so I am ever so glad to be safe inside these walls. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes of houses such as this as frameworks for our subconscious underpinnings. The houses we grow up in he say’s frame our experience of place. I didn’t grow up in this house, I am in fact only just discovering its secrets and details but I feel that way about my subconscious as well so perhaps under a new frame is an ideal place to be.
Now it rains again.
Now my rather romantic rainy reverie is broken by the alarm I set for the loaf of rye bread I popped in the oven an hour ago.
The rain is too ephemeral. It’s already done and small white butterflies flit about the mock orange to the tune of an occasional soft drip. The garden here is wild and in desperate need of weeding to the eye of a gardener, but I generally leave it to be as is, not fully sure how much ownership to take of a place I’ve only lived in for a month. Oh but what a place! To begin with, there is a garden, four large raised veggie beds off to one side of the back yard which is itself dominated by one large pear tree, two other fruit trees still staked in their youth and an enormous mock orange, now, just at the end of its bloom. To either side there are more trees, old and enormous having been planted on Mapleton Hill no doubt in the early 1900’s: Silver Maple, Linden, Blue Spruce, Ceder… and Elder. I’ve only ever know Elder as a medium sized shrub, though in lore it has this Crone like wise and slightly dangerous character, the Elder Mother. This one here is friendly to my eyes but certainly wizened and large, reaching easily 30 feet in height and spread. This lady lives on the East side of the house and exudes her own heady scent at the very height of her bloom so as not to compete with the earlier, sweeter, mock orange.
Now comes the whistles of hummingbirds.
The house itself; painted blue bricks and sprinkled with stained glass windows in no particular pattern, faces south on Highland Street at 6th Avenue in Boulder, Colorado. The kind of house with a hundred wonderful places to sit; this nook, that cranny, the large covered front porch or the wood panelled and warm living room are all good. I could lounge by the out of tune piano in either the African printed couch I brought here myself, or the old stuffed leather chair. That room makes me think of expatriates, and seems to beg for some kind of savannah dwellers head on a plaque. There is the meditation room to sit in; it offers a floor, cushions optional. The kitchen is always a good place to sit, not to mention a good place to stand and cook. There are chairs and logs upon which to seat oneself in the back yard, a couch upstairs on the landing between the two stairs and any number of other window wells, chairs, bedsides or branches that you could install yourself on for a spell. Myself, I have left the kitchen with coffee in tow and taken up residence for the time being in the atrium. Between the expatriate piano salon and the living room there is a sunken pebbled area with a flagstone waterfall feature and skylights to complement its tall windows. Nearly every surface is home to some houseplant or other contained by a wide array of pots. In here among the plants is another overstuffed chair, upholstered in purple and shoved into the side where there is a space, if not quite enough. My shoulders are sharing the space with some kind of palm on the right and above my head the skylights offerings are dappled through what’s maybe a fig. I am not knowledgeable about houseplants, but they make for fine companions on a Sunday morning such as this. The atrium makes a kind of screen between the aforementioned rooms, and on one side serves as a hallway and communal library. The books seem to have been arranged not alphabetically but by predominant colour. At the top left is the black shelf, bedside it to the right a white shelf. Clockwise around there are a half green, half yellow shelf and then a red shelf. Below that; brown to the left and blue to the right. Moving down from there the system of organization seems to dissolve into odds and ends.
Now the sky has dimmed again and distant rumbling suggests the rain may not be quite done with us yet. The skylights above are streaked with a few drops and there is a faint tapping.
This house is a walk of mere minutes to reach the trailheads into the foothills, or the heavily foot trafficked Pearl St. Mall. It is surrounded by the wealthy of Boulder on all sides and their immaculate homes and gardens; this place though is a little oasis of weeds, both the garden variety and the social. As a garden resident I would consider myself to be a weed. Not a stately flowering shrub, nor showy annual. I am not a carefully bred perennial, nor an intentionally placed piece of statuary. I am a volunteer; I arrive, sometimes uninvited, sometimes planted with the idea of making tea or seasoning. I quickly establish myself in the cracks or corners where there is room to breathe. Sometimes I get out of hand and push others out of their comfort zones, if allowed to take root I will do so deeply, and there will be no getting rid of me. These are the people in society that find the places where change is needed and apply themselves to the pressure points. This house is a haven for weeds in the middle of a classical garden.
This house is the kind of place you could only find yourself living in through a series of remarkable synchronicities. I kind of marvel to find myself here and at the same time I feel that there is no place else I could possibly be, a part of me has maybe always been here? However it is, this is where I am and am supposed to be I am certain of that. It is a house for being, dreaming and restoring: A place to find one selves center amidst the chaos. The circumstances of my own life of late have certainly felt like chaos, so I am ever so glad to be safe inside these walls. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes of houses such as this as frameworks for our subconscious underpinnings. The houses we grow up in he say’s frame our experience of place. I didn’t grow up in this house, I am in fact only just discovering its secrets and details but I feel that way about my subconscious as well so perhaps under a new frame is an ideal place to be.
Now it rains again.
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