still in love with you
Blaise at five o’clock Thursday morning, Blaise Harris, who acknowledges me as having a soft voice and a hand to scratch and pet, but shows her true love lapsitting and lapnapping Linda and leaving behind buckets of cat hair. Affectionate and gentle, Blaise is an accomplished escape artist who at least twice last week soon after our arrival, escaped out the back door of the rectory, the second time by roughly pushing aside a blocking chair and ice chest but has since been flummoxed and meowingly frustrated by heavier deterrents.
Above, rectory at five o’clock Thursday morning as I return from a short visit into Trinity Church to snap a picture of the Rectory as first built in 1900:
Taken from Avenue E, which then was Chestnut Street. Rear of the church building in the background, the picture shows the north side of the house before the new master bedroom was added over the kitchen (window shutters closed). Man and two children IDK, perhaps the Rector. Perhaps the Rev. George Benedict. Originally the house porch wrapped from partially round the north side, from the dining room as shown, round the front, and completely round the south side. All of that south side porch has since been enclosed to allow a tiny screen porch off the kitchen, a machinery room for water heater and a downstairs bathroom, extended family room, and at the southwest corner a little den that I had enclosed in the late 1980s or early 1990s for use as my office and where I could watch comings and goings at the church and at Benedict Hall, the parish house. At some point I surrendered that space to Tassy’s rat cage, then reclaimed it after she went away to college in Virginia.
The pictured fence was removed ages ago and, when I saw the picture with the old original fence, I felt comfortable having it rebuilt during our tenure as a privacy and security measure.
This dream of an old house has been cared for lovingly by the church folks, and to live here once, such as our fourteen years, is to love it forever, a place of the heart.
This dream of an old house has been cared for lovingly by the church folks, and to live here once, such as our fourteen years, is to love it forever, a place of the heart.
One of many things I enjoyed about living here in the Rectory was spotting changes where doors have been closed and moved over its hundred-seventeen years. There’s one upstairs and this morning I noticed another downstairs in the pantry,
and I always imagined the ghosts of former residents still using those old closed and walled-over doors as they pass from room to room. What I saw this morning, in the kitchen pantry that now is accessed from the hall passway between family room and kitchen, is that there once was a door from the pantry directly into the kitchen. I’m not sure, but north of the inside pantry wall there seems to be a void before the external north wall of the house.
Inside the church this morning, I snapped a picture of Way of the Cross Station 15, an icon that is Christus Victor. In the 1990s I contracted with parishioner artist Phyllis Blake, who wrote icons, for a set of fourteen Stations of the Cross icons plus that 15th station. The work took months to complete, and then walking the Stations of the Cross as the conclusion of our Good Friday liturgy, I'd set Station 15 on the Altar and we concluded with everyone coming up beyond the Altar rail into the sanctuary for the final station and to distribute the Holy Sacrament that had been reserved from Maundy Thursday.
Apalachicola is magical, and its magic is part of my Being.
DThos+ somewhere in +Time+