Another flashback

First May, then November. It's come a long way, baby.

Feb. 9, March 26, Nov. 17

On our way back from lunch, Arnold stopped at the thrift shop up the street to pick up a couple of wood clamps he'd seen there, and I told one of the sisters who run it that I hoped to do proud by Marvin, who owned our house before us.

"Oh, he's looking down and smiling," she said. "I mean, you did put a pool in back there, didn't you? He always wanted one."

The ties that bind

I took this picture Tuesday when the dust was settling around noon.

Brantley and Kurt, who'd already done the front-facing wall just around the corner to the left, had just begun a quick lunch break after starting up the loft ceiling.

Arnold and Frank were off ordering doors.

Franklin had finished the upstairs drywall and was moving his stuff downstairs so he could tackle the water-heater cubbyhole.

And there I was alone again at eye level with my beloved collar ties.

Five months ago, when I first spent some time up close and personal with them, I said, "I think the contrast between the new wood ceilings and the old wood ties will be just wonderful."

I think I was right, and of course they're even older than I'd thought then -- from the early 1880s.

Today I got a piece of sandpaper and buffed off a bit of the oxidation on a side you wouldn't see from the door. Sure enough, the old hand sawing marks stood out smartly.

"Oh my goodness," said Franklin, who'd come back upstairs for a sawhorse. "It really makes you think about how they built these places." It does indeed.

Happy birthday, dear Reffard

I ordered this in early August, and it was pure luck that it finally arrived two days before Ref's birthday.

It's bronze, 8 by 8, and about 3/8 inch thick. Though I've since found the house is about 20 years older, at least what's on the plaque reflects the Historic Architecture Commission records.

I went over at breakfast time Saturday to give it to Ref, and he wasn't quite up, but asked if I could come back around noon.

I did, and he was sleeping. He woke up, though, when he heard Dollie mentioning my name, and asked me to come on in.

I told him the plaque would always be his -- of course it would live at our front door at some point -- and propped it up on a cabinet at the foot of his bed. I haven't seen that big a grin in a long time.

Maybe we should call it 'Cebollita'

. . . Which would mean "Little Onion," but I'm getting ahead of my story.

It was wet Tuesday -- not rain; that was up the Keys; Lower Matecumbe Key got 8 inches.

We got some drizzle before dawn, so all the water here was vaporized. Our neighbor Dennis, who looked as if he'd been hosed off early and repeatedly, asked "Humid enough for ya?" as I trudged to the house, and found Mike and Mr. B working on siding and decking.

I did sundry sultry errands and then went to the polls -- though my T-shirt was too wet for the "I voted" sticker to stick.

So I retreated to the cool, dry archive room at the library, where Tom Hambright, the county historian, is as helpful, bright and nice as he is tall, which is very.

I was curious about one Mr. S.S. Field, who's listed in architectural and tax records as having built our house in 1908.

Tom consulted old city directories -- nothing. Then hand-written city tax ledgers. I made lists of possible names, based on plat, tract and lot, and checked directories again -- and there was our house in 19
. . . 06! Joanna Niles, widow of Nathan, lived there, and so did her sons George and Cleveland, both cigarmakers.

(A light bulb went on for Tom, and he loped over to a city news index he and his wife, Lynda, had put together -- and sure enough: Cleveland was Monroe County sheriff, 1926-33, and is probably our only sitting sheriff to have been arrested for beating his wife, in 1929.)

But Tom was curious. Was that as far back as could be found? On a whim, he looked on the official Sanborn fire-insurance maps from 1899, which are regarded as gospel. There was our house, plus a few tiny sheds (probably bedrooms) on the lot. Ditto 1892. Ditto 1889. What the heck?

So he checked the giant 1884 Bird's Eye View of Key West, and it sure looks as if our house, set back demurely from the street, is there. Earlier than that, you can't peel this onion.

By the way, in 1906 our house was appraised at $100, the lot at $400.

Pegged to last

When the deck wood came in, I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose it -- fresh, smooth and strong -- with a heavy old hand-hewn beam end Ref had salvaged: a tough and tested survivor.

(The beam itself got recycled into the new wall between the living room and bedroom, but its tongue and peg hole, made by the ship's carpenters who framed the old house, were too good to toss.)

I found another juxtaposition a few days later.

Uncle Albert was doing some surgery on the soffit, helped by his great-nephew, the younger Shawn.

It had taken Albert about half a second to identify the beam as cypress -- a lifetime of carpentry, much of it with boats, will do that.

Old, tough and tested, working hard to pass it along to fresh, smooth and strong. Now that's building -- just a thought for Labor Day.

Tangy and tough at 98

Ref was cutting up some of the old siding for patches (soon to undergo invisible reweaving), and I closed my eyes and inhaled as his toughest table saw worked through them. "Good saw," Ref said. "When the blade's sharp, you can cut to a sixteenth."

You can't savor the tang through the picture -- planks packed with aroma after all these years, still full of the resins and oils that made old Dade pine so resistant to both termites and weather.

And because I didn't want to interrupt his work to "set up" the right light, you can't see the polished glow of the sawn edges. They were so dense they looked and felt varnished.

Ref saw my fascination with those pieces and broke off to walk over to a stack of freshly delivered 2-by-4's. "This is what they sell for No. 1 wood these days," he said, pointing at the knots and making a sour face. He found a piece of new scrap and made a quick cut through a section. It looked like styrofoam by comparison, bleached and character-free. "They dry this stuff out too much," he said.

"Now look at these," as he went back to the old planks. "This is No. 1 wood." Tight-grained, unblemished and beautiful behind peeling paint. Tougher than nails -- he'd had to buy a new gun to cope with the old degree of hardness.

Lord, I thought, if I ever approach their age, may I be half as sturdy and smell half as fresh.

Geometries of light

The roofers are due any minute now to tear off the old tin -- and when they do, and the new underlayment goes down, so long to this light-play in the loft.

I'll miss the patterns, but not the leaks.

Blest be the ties

A lot went up today -- namely the big wall in the upstairs bedroom. But I'm bushed, so I'll fill those details in tomorrow.

Meanwhile, these horizontal things are 98-year-old collar ties. In structural terms, they helped keep the house together all this time.

Ref said he could flesh 'em out and wrap 'em to match the new ceiling -- but they're going to stay just as they are, aside from a little cosmetic buff and gloss, as a reminder of the bones of the house.

I think the contrast between the new wood ceiling and the old wood ties will be just wonderful.

What lies beneath

This lovely queen conch -- Strombus gigas, Linnaeus named it in 1758 -- came up not on a beach, but in the bucket of the five-ton backhoe at our pool dig. I was blown away that it had so little damage as it tumbled out among the rocks. Oh, sure, a chipped lip here and some bad stains there, but all in all quite a survivor. It doesn't even have the little hole where you dig in to get the meat out.

On Sunday, when I should have made a blog entry, I was reading another Margaret Atwood novel (Alias Grace this time), and washing the shell. I took an old toothbrush to it and thought about it.

I couldn't help thinking about our conch cottage. It's an architectural style that hails back to the Bahamas -- "Bahama conch" is the usual term here -- with some nods to New England and Africa, about as multicultural as can be. Conch "houses" are two-story. Conch "cottages" are a modest one- or one-and-a-half-story.

Conch structures mix esthetic touches with lots of defensive mechanisms. They are almost always up on piers (for air circulation and to keep dry), have sloping metal roofs (to reflect sun and carry water to the cistern), use dormers (to expand usable space), are shuttered (against hurricanes and the hot sun, while letting air in), have porches (to provide shade and a nice place to sit) and feature tongue-and-groove paneling (for structural strength in each room).

That's our house to a T, though our cistern was filled in decades ago and we'll go for a pool instead.

And part of me thinks the shell is me to a T as well. Older rather than younger -- certainly not the buffed-up, polished version all shiny pink and wired for lamps (though they sure are decorative in the night). Chipped, spotted and stained during a long trip through the years, but still instantly recognizable for what it is. Lit the right way, considered with care, not bad.

And certainly at home in Key West.

Think of them as vents

Since it was only spitting this morning, I decided to hike over to the house to see how the new roof held up under the inch-plus onslaught.

It turns out that Tuesday's drench was the first significant rain since . . . November, a record dry spell that started right after Wilma.

Sure enough, the second floor was bone-dry. As for the front corner where the tin had torn off, not so much.

Still, the gaps make a nice pattern.
The old wood, by the way, is rough-cut pine, extremely tough stuff, and the beams are pegged with gum wood -- flexible enough to give a bit in a storm, but then spring back to where they ought to be.

True grid

Ref and Brantley were laying out the grid where the rest of the piers will go: under the deck and the new "wing." Ref had one of those spinning-laser devices to get everything level within a micron or two. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had used OnStar for lateral position -- but he did the geometry and checked diagonals and such for that.

The little yellow plastic whirligig on the tripod, and its beeping sensor-on-a-stick, made me think of Dad, and his beautiful old brass transit, decked out in scribed wheels and studded with leveling bubbles and a giant floating compass needle. It looks a bit like a big old sextant, and it guided his voyages across America in the '30s and '40s to leave ribbons of highway in his wake. In the '50s he used it to lay out Mineral Springs. In the '60s through the '80s, it gridded ephemeral gatherings of Airstreamers. By the '90s, it had gone into retirement as a museum piece on our library shelf.

So there was the laser thing, sending out its beams to generate beeps and "bingo" noises. I could see Dad standing back in the shade, studying it, wrinkling his brow, puzzling about it, shifting his hat back on his head, putting his hands on his hips, smiling, shaking his head in amazement.

March: In like a lion

It was Marvin's house

The star of our story, built in 1908.

(Editor's note: Oops. Later research shows it was built in the early 1880s. See details here.)

I don't know how many times we walked by it when we were house-sitting for Sullins, and Marvin Hall was sitting on his front porch, always saying hey. Then Marvin died. Then we bought it.

It's a sweet little thing -- becoming a sweet bigger thing after a few months' negotiations with HARC.