Opening

So -- Rankintown. That's the name of the original settlement back in the far away long agos, when the Rankins came to the county. They were there long before the surrounding towns were settled and were your basic yeoman farmers -- good solid Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who came down the Great Wagon Road. I'm not going to go into a lot of the area's history. That's Richard's department. Plus, I want this to be more a chronicle of the progress of the house.

Anyway, the house is down to the studs, pretty much. I told Richard I can practically hear it sigh with relief. We're tearing out all the horrors perpetrated upon the poor thing by years of hillbilly-inhabitants and their pack of miscreant dogs. I want the house to remember its past as the scene of beautiful parties and Sunday naps. I want it to forget having its feet chewed by mongrels, and a yard strewn with old tires filled with mosquito-y water, and the sullen, humorless people it was reduced to sheltering. Now it's standing half-bare on its hillside, with light shining through gaps in the old panelling.


Renovation. I know, even without checking the OED, that "new" is in there somewhere. I've debated whether this is renewal or rehabilitation. Of course, it's both, but I think I'll have to plump for "renovation." We're bringing the place back to life. Richard said today he hopes the new house will be a "cheese and crackers" kind of place, which was sort of brilliant. Cheese and crackers and NPR and wine on the porch and cool people walking up the hill and a blue and yellow kitchen and a screened porch with a bird book perched on the railing. Maybe a bottle tree. And a fire pit and a metal roof to keep out the wet of rain but let in the sound. And I'm certain there will be this smell -- this cool damp smell of ferns and creeks and fallen trees -- that will roll up the hill in the evenings and in the morning. Right now, the house is open to the breeze, which it needs.

We're going to call it Sugahaw, which is an invented word. Sort of. Many of the old place names around here are white people's versions of Indian words. I found a Catawba Indian lexicon online, and I made up Sugahaw from the word that meant our house. Suga like sugar. It sounds like an old place name, so I've pretended that I've invented history with my invented word. We mentioned to the architect we were thinking of using this name, but in truth we hadn't really decided. On the first go-round of plans, however, he printed Sugahaw, and that was it for me. We had named the place. Sugahaw. And now I think of the house sighing, and the breeze blowing through its skeleton, and Sugahaw doesn't feel invented, it feels inevitable. Like it really was there all along. Before Rankintown, before anything. Except that smell of ferns and creeks and fallen trees.