Knowing by Heart
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These columns were originally published in the Kings County Record between 1984 and 2016.
The illustrations are by Alice, most of the photographs are by Lee

​It is a bad plan that admits of no change

11/11/2016

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Picture
(c) R. L. Whitney, 2016 - originally published in the Kings County Record

When I was young I thought houses were - houses. They had been built at some time, no doubt. (I remember the housing boom that erupted around my house in the years just after the end of the Second World War and ate up lovely vacant fields as if they were bread). Having come into existence by some fiat or other, though, I thought they never changed.

Permanence is a term that has undergone a considerable shift in meaning since I grew up. When I see bold letters on an ad proclaiming that the advertiser has been in business since 2006, I know he has some pride in his business and feels he has built up a reputation in those years. But if someone were to ask me to - quick! - complete the phrase, “In business since . . .” I know without hesitation I would offer some date like 1896 or 1926. But for most people, that’s not permanence, that’s eternity.

When I was a kid one of my favourite breakfast foods was Nabisco Shredded Wheat. (Mother used to heat them with a little butter and salt, even though Nabisco pushed turning them into a soggy mess by soaking them in hot milk). I think shredded wheat is still sold but Nabisco has gone and whatever ate Nabisco has been eaten by some even bigger corporation. A daughter who works for what I thought of as a bigger corporation tells us that her bigger corporation has been sold - to a still-bigger corporation. And so it goes. What ever happened to 5-cent candy bars?

Houses too, like businesses, find themselves ‘Under New Management,’ or ‘New and Improved,’ or even at ‘New Location.’  Our farmhouse stood on the same spot for a length of time that took it back probably pretty close to forever, and though it looked like a staid country house, if we could make a short video of the changes over the years the video would probably look like one of those five-minute time-delay shots of clouds growing, dividing, fading, expanding.

I know it began life (when? how far back in the nineteenth century?) as a dug cellar with dry stone walls, four tiny rooms, and a loft. Sometime later (still in the nineteenth century?) the roof was raised by several feet to make the building a story-and-a-half. Then in the early twentieth century the kitchen wing was added and several bedrooms above it.

Perhaps the past only seems more permanent. Some years ago, as we were stripping clapboards off the back wall, we found one stencilled with “Stetson, Cutler & Co., No. 1. St John, N.B.”  The company whose name appeared on our clapboard was started in Indiantown in 1867 by a Robert Rankin, was taken over by Hayford and Stetson in 1881 and sometime later became Stetson and Cutler. Stetson, Cutler & Co. closed in 1923.  (I've found a picture and description of the old company here) 

Our coming here meant the place was, for the first time in its life, ‘Under New Management.’ I remember my wife drawing a picture of what she thought the new addition should look like. She didn’t get out drafting tools and a T-square to do it. We still have the picture somewhere, done in pencil on a piece of lined paper, maybe four inches square.

We took it to Gordon DeLong, who was to become Resident Carpenter and friend of the family. To my amazement he looked at the sketch and thought it could be done - and proceeded to do it. Having always thought that anything that complicated had to have blueprints, architects, and lawyers, I marvelled to look at Gordon’s work.

Other changes have occurred since then, many of them by another carpenter and friend, Graydon Ricker. Still later, when we decided to do some renovations to the kitchen, we asked our son-in-law, Wolfgang Westner, to take on the project. Not being a fast learner, I went into planning mode, got a modest drafting program for the computer, and started to measure things and do plans and generally got myself tied in knots.

Wolfgang had been on the job only a short time when I realised that he had a far finer design sense than I had. Where I saw problems, he saw solutions, and the solutions turned out to be better than anything I could have devised.

​A long-ago lumber yard, a trio of good tradesmen helping. In the midst of change the house remained what it always was, a good one.
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    Words & Images

    We moved to our farm in Sussex, New Brunswick from Toronto in 1977, only moving away in 2014. 

    For over 30 years of our life there, I wrote a weekly column for the Kings County Record in Sussex chronicling the little events that are the heart of ‘daily life’ in a small place in the country.  These blog posts are drawn from those columns.

    The weekly column became, over the years, a series of bench-marks or surveyor’s stakes to record the contours of the place we lived, its dreaming hills and fertile valleys, icy chasms and swift-flowing streams. 

    While I no longer live on the farm, we continue to share the columns from time to time on this blog.  And very soon you will be able to read my book!  To be published in December 2019.  

    ----
    Images on the blog are drawn from my own photography,  and my wife Alice's artwork.  We occasionally resort to other people's images when nothing we have on hand suits the content of the post.  

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