I have to hold my breath each time I make this drive

Every time I make my way through west-central Ohio, driving on US 33, I have to hold my breath about the time I hit the East Liberty exit. You see, there’s this house, and each time I drive through I fully expect to see a bare patch of dirt marking this home’s former location. It happens often along other routes I travel. It happens too often.

It’s an old house…people who’ve lived there during its nearly 200 years of existence have made continual changes. Sometimes little changes, and sometimes big changes. And it’s seen change around it…the landscape, the things people do in and near this house…

I love the house for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the status I’ve accorded it; as a survivor. I freely admit to having a deep admiration for survivors…people who’ve never given up, no matter what gets thrown at them over the course of their lives. Survivors are the type of people who nourish others with their energy, and if you spend enough time around them, will make you a better person.

The house itself is a riddle: a sturdy piece of construction with subtle style: two very different pieces of homes, stuck together at some point.

There’s a wood-framed portion, and a masonry portion. I don’t know which is older, but I’d guess the masonry portion. Each piece exhibits intriguing details: small windows with board & batten shutters, a large dormer (perhaps a 20th century addition) a sawtooth brick cornice, paired attic windows.

Like any elderly building, the home shows its age; mottled finishes of paint and patina, a sagging roofline, and certainly internal pieces and systems that may have once functioned adequately, but have become obsolescent with the passage of time.

Obsolescence in a building is like cancer in a person; when people start talking inadvertently about you in the past tense. They’ve already worked through the situation in their mind and have come to the logical conclusion: that is, we’ll have to start getting used to life without you soon enough, hence we talk about you in the past tense. But for now, the tenuous connection to the past hangs on in this Logan County home.

When I drive by I wonder about the first European owner of the land…the person who cleared the land and put it under cultivation, heralding in a new and very different era to the state. The house is located in the northern reaches of the Virginia Military District, a large and irregular tract of land provided to soldiers of the Virginia Militia in exchange for their service in the Revolutionary War. Was the builder a Virginia native who emigrated to claim his payment for service? Why was the second piece of this building built? And just which part was first?

So it goes, I drive by the home, always on my way to somewhere, and I think. I think more about this house than most others in Ohio. And while I admire this house and its tenacity and the time it’s had here, I know it’s fleeting. Survivors live, but we all eventually return to where we came from. Houses are no different. And while I can accept that nothing will last forever, and that part of preservation is recognizing that we’ll eventually lose every battle, the tragedy is when the person (or the house) loses its battle prematurely. It hurts when they go before they should have. People and buildings.