Alexandria, VA – Ahhh, living in France.
One evening around 9:00 pm last month, there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, there stood a stranger. After some broken French and English between us, I learned that he had grown up in our house and had not been back since 1964. I invited him and his wife in, and he gave us a history of the house: the house belonged to his veterinarian grandfather who invented special medicines for horses in one of the outbuildings, and often used medicinal herbs. (That explained the horse stalls).
After visiting his ‘old bedroom’ upstairs and some pleasant conversation about their life, they bid farewell and headed back to Paris.
The mysterious nostalgic evening visit got me thinking about other places where Pamela and I had lived. I have always loved the histories of homes; digging into their pasts is a lot of fun.
Pamela lived in an 1856 Italianate home on Nantasket Beach on Boston’s south shore when we first met. The monster eight-bedroom house had a mysterious basement that she learned of from an old local. He asked if she had been into the tunnel from the house to the beach. He said the tunnel was a gateway into the community for the small boats that came ashore during Prohibition.
Searching the basement the next day, Pamela and her son Jonathan discovered a false brick wall they had never questioned before. Digging revealed a Civil War boot and an old whiskey bottle. Joe Kennedy, patriarch of the Kennedy family, had a home just down the street and was known to be in the bootlegging business. So who knows?
After our meeting and subsequent courtship, she bravely moved into my 1941-vintage, Tiffany-designed condo in ParkFairfax, another historic community of wartime housing where then-Congressmen Richard Nixon and Jerry Ford once lived with their young, growing families.
Then, out of the blue, a friend called saying he had taken a job in California and could we possibly take over their lease on a home in the 100 block of Prince Street. Well, knowing Old Town history and having the Little Theatre of Alexandria, where I had done theatre, was just down the street, we jumped at the chance and, as soon as possible, moved in.
We loved being denizens of Old Town, walking the streets, with me reading every plaque on the buildings, enjoying the happenings of one of America’s oldest towns—we thrived. Pamela was working at Mount Vernon, yet another fabled historic home, and was loving life.
Then one day, a strange sound came burbling out of the basement kitchen of our Prince Street home. It seems that the sewerage line running from the house into Old Town’s main sewerage line had burst and our kitchen and dining room was full of – well – sewage.
The City sent its finest team and before we knew it, our sewerage line was expertly reconstructed. The kitchen, however, was a disaster. All appliances, cabinets, furnishings, and the dining room floor had been removed to get at that mischievous sewerage line. The owners were required to replace the kitchen.
Despite the fact that insurance would have covered the replacements, the owners merely had the 1960s vintage cabinets wiped down and put back in place. Then, adding insult to injury, when our lease renewal came due, they chose not to renew our lease, as if we had caused the hubbub.
With some quick sleuthing by Pamela, we found a wonderful first-floor rental off Washington and Princess Streets, so we moved in and re-set our lives. This also presented a great opportunity to continue our relationship with Old Town. The house was a historic home once owned a one of the Lees. A combination of original colonial architecture and a Victorian add-on to Washington Street, we always wondered who might have been the historic owner.
After a year of commuting from Old Town to my office in Crystal City, the one-hour commute time had sapped my enthusiasm for Northern Virgina. I,d lived there for over 15 years (less a year for a tour in Iraq), and with the blessing from my boss to telecommute, we moved into another historic Victorian home, this one in New London, Connecticut, we had discovered online.
It turned out to be the first home designed for Theodore Bodenwein, an Austrian-born immigrant who founded the oldest family-owned newspaper in Connecticut. The house was a beauty with a gorgeous stained-glass staircase. Bodenwein married a Tiffany (Louis’s sister), and we thought maybe, just maybe, the staircase was a Tiffany design, we could sell the house for the staircase alone, and retire to luxurious ease. Alas, from a Sotheby’s appraiser in NYC we learned that it was not a Tiffanny but likely one of his proteges.
Unfortunately, New London had a long and nefarious reputation. After six years battling the Old Guard, firmly entrenched and not forward-thinking, we sold our home for a song and moved into a 1948 rental in Mystic, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound.
The Mystic House was the former Mystic postmaster’s family vacation home on Mason’s Island. It was a cute, lovely, and picturesque home hand-built by the Postmaster and, except for the kitchen appliances, hadn’t been upgraded since it was built. It was a tranquil and picturesque home, but once again, the landlord chose not to replace roof tiles after hurricanes and, in the spirit of entrepreneurial America, raised our rent 20 percent per year.
When the call came to move to France, we were out on a rental limb. Despite dozens of potential properties and emails to owners about our ravenous interest in their homes, France’s premiere online rental property website failed to connect potential owners with our desire to cement a long-term presence.
Today, after many twists and turns, our good luck brought us to a beautiful Maison de Maitre in the Normandy countryside with lots of room and a bright local village community here in France’s farmland. In January 2024, we signed a three-year lease and settled into a lifestyle that can only be described as magical.
After seven months in this beautiful home, the owner contacted us to say she wants to sell the house. It looks like all those socialist rumors about France are wrong. They are as capitalistic as Americans.
I’m sure Pamela is simply jazzed about the secure lifestyle I promised for our twilight years. Roseanne Roseannadana said it best: “It’s always somethin’.”
ICYMI: Alexandria Women for Good Award Volunteer Alexandria $11K Grant
