Continuing from yesterday's post: Just as autumn takes me back, back, back to the condemned house I lived in long ago, the image of someone reading or writing or working by lamplight and surrounded by darkness always takes me right back there, too. This 19th century painting by Karl Müller is titled in German: Lesende junge Frau an einem Tisch beim Licht der Petroleumlampe. I think it means "young woman reading at a table by the light of an oil lamp." Or something very close to that.
We did not have any oil lamps inside our house, but we had a couple of electric lamps, flashlights, candles, and the tiny light bulb on a sewing machine. Just as we ran a garden hose from the house next door, we also ran an endlessly-long, heavy-duty extension cord, from which other extension cords were attached. The heavy duty cord came in through the dining room window, and we covered it in leaves, too, to hide its pathway between the two houses.
We were not sure, you see, if siphoning off utilities from one house to another was legal, however much in agreement both parties were to the arrangement. We were all in our twenties, and this was a very high adventure in living on a shoestring . . .
Here is a recreation of living by lamplight in the condemned house. That rug would have been there, for it is one of several that came to me from my grandmother. And those two books would certainly have been there: The black one on the bottom is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee, and the yellow book on top is The I Ching. I have spent a lifetime delving into Agee's book just to savour the pure poetry of his writing, and there was a time when I use to "throw the I Ching," the phrase I had heard being used back then.
For the whole year of living in this house, in fact, the toss of the coins to see which reading I would get in The I Ching invariably took me to "Ku/Work on What Has Been Spoiled." It did seem a most appropriate reading as we worked to bring this old house back up to city code again. At the back of my mind, however, I always felt this reading was much more personal, and had to do with choices I was making that were taking me farther and farther off the beaten path.
The electrical cord had its own built-in ramifications. With three or four people in our house, and four or five people in the house next door, between us we managed to blow the fuses every few days, it seemed. Then someone (not me) would trudge out to the fuse box to set things right again.
And here is how it would have looked mending an apron on my sewing machine by the light of my sewing machine on top of a suitcase for a table. The sewing machine was my grandmother's, as was the old blue pitcher from yesterday's post, and all the furniture and lamps and cookware that eventually ended up inside this wonderful old house.
There was many a night when I read or wrote in my writing books by the light of my sewing machine. The front of this house faced a busy street, with a little postcard of a yard, but the sides and all of the back were nothing but trees and vines, so it was always dark inside, even during daytime. I remember its insides as a deep attic darkness lit by little pools of warm yellow light, and flooded with music, for one of the extension cords led to a record player which was housed in an old victrola cabinet.
I found this painting by Carl Larsson, "Light Interior at Mora," which is very different from other Larsson paintings. This one is more impressionistic, its soft colors flowing into one another, a figure in dark bent over the pool of light on a table. This is how I remember that year in the condemned house, with all the edges of my memories blurred like watercolors awash upon a page.
As September turned into October, and October turned into November, we began to blow the fuses much more frequently, what with electric heaters being turned on both inside our house and inside the house next door in the early morning cold.
And suddenly keeping warm became an ongoing dilemma. Tomorrow I will tell you about the misadventures of keeping warm by fire.
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