SO L.A.--FORMERLY : A Tale of Two Very Different, You know Spaces

My family decided to leave Los Angeles, the city of my birth, even before the riots, the increasing combat-zone quality of life, the accumulated stresses and the earthquake. The most significant factor in the decision to relocate was our inability to afford a home in a neighborhood where we wanted to live.

We found the opportunity to move when my husband joined the faculty of Alfred University, a small private college in the Allegheny Mountains of western New York state. I looked at a dozen houses in a single afternoon and bought the second one I saw. I was struck by its unique charm. I thought, “It’s the ultimate Topanga Canyon house. Malibu Canyon, at one tenth the price.”

That was one afternoon in May. I knew there were problems. It was a 150-year-old farmhouse surrounded by a ring of 40 apple trees, some of them feral, all of them wildly beautiful. A house on a hill, with 15 acres, beyond which there were only maple, birch and pine forests.

The house would have to be updated, I knew that: made more conventionally Los Angeles, more urban, modern, private. It needed white walls and new fixtures. There was something wrong with the layout. I would wake up in the night in the throes of doubt. By August, as we drove across the country, I had completely forgotten what the house looked like. Somewhere in the heartland, certainly by Indiana, I become convinced I had purchased a derelict, wind-throttled barn.

In actuality, the house is sturdy, gray wood and flagstone. It was the coldest winter in years and nothing leaks or breaks. The interior is a sequence of woods, floors and walls, beams from old barns, and steps and angles and glass everywhere. I spent months staggering from the brilliance of the landscape, how the views from each window were different, the summer of deer three feet from where I stood, the orchard turning yellow then red, the fields of sweet corn going to straw. Fall was a siege of inflamed maples, leaves like wine and fire. They are not burgundy or magenta. They are more intense then anything I have a word for. I understood harvest rituals, the shapes of Halloween, which seem contrived in urban Los Angeles. Here, where there are seasons, they are a natural progression of events, with leaves the orange of pumpkins, and real bats. We had one in the house for a week.

Still, there was the problem with the layout of the house’s interior. The upstairs has three bedrooms and a large bathroom, with an enormous claw-footed bathtub and a new pine sauna. I had planned to add another bathroom to the master bedroom. Then I was informed that the roof couldn’t be altered. The roof is this house’s Pandora’s Box. It’s inviolate.

It had never occurred to me that our family of three would share a bathroom. I would not have bought this house if I knew that. I suppose that’s where it began, the radical shift in my thinking. It started with the shared bathroom and having to communicate directly with our teenager: “You bathe first. Then it’s my turn.” Once you are sharing a bathroom with your spouse and adolescent, the concept of being a one-telephone, one-computer, one-television family becomes increasingly plausible. When the difficulty and expense of adding equipment and finding reliable workmen becomes a fact of life, the idea of being a family that shares possessions and space becomes increasingly tolerable.

In Los Angeles, we had separate bathrooms, of course, our own phone lines, computers and televisions. This was a given. We had our adult life, and our teenager had her version of events. In fact, many of our friends had separate wings of their houses, parent-versus-child space, as befits people who inhabit the same structure but have different lives, activities, friends, vocabularies, music, entertainments. Privacy between family members is one of the basic laws of the new order. It’s in the bones of the houses themselves. It’s a fundamental structural component. Decoded, it says to your child, “You and your problems, incipient vices, confusions, communiques with the outside, which we do not monitor or even want to know about, take them to your area, now. We give you things, and in return, we expect you to be absent.”

The intrinsic lure of this 150-year old farmhouse that I fell in love with is embedded in the wood and flagstone, in the view of the valley and the pond, which I can see now that the leaves have fallen. The appeal of this house is that it can’t be urbanized or made more like Los Angeles, not unless we gutted and rebuilt it. The charm of this house is that it is, irrefutably, in every angle and piece of wood, a family home.

I had never considered the psychology of architecture before, how profoundly the layout of houses reflects our concept of our roles, the tangible shape of our affections, the quality of our intimacy, the value of interaction versus its absence, and the level of mutual tolerance and cooperation that living together necessitates. The texture of tangibly interwoven lives is like a fine fabric, muslin and certain hand-stitched cottons that last centuries. It implies hands. Our farmhouse was built by people who expected it to stand for hundreds of winters. These people planned to spend their decades sharing their meals and bathing facilities, their entertainments, their thoughts and visitors, In short, the events of their lives.

I realize now, in retrospect, that although we believed we had the sort of family values culturally extolled, we were actually superficial in our involvements. We thought we were doing a good job, checking the homework, bed by 9, personal hygiene supervision, frequent teacher conferences, dinner together on a semi-regular basis with an obligatory but keep-it-short daily synopsis. But in fact, we were merely inhabiting the some physical space while engaging in separate lives. That’s why it felt like a job.

There’s a family room in this house with a television, a fireplace and a record player, and the three of us are in this room much of the time. The kitchen is central; all rooms lead to and from it. Cooking and what it implies, survival and nurturing, are not abstractions that occur offstage. Rather, they are activities that are prominent and shared. My daughter and I have both learned to cook since we moved here, in a world without takeout. We have discovered recipes and how to follow them. We have picked apples and cooked them, together, making applesauce that we put in jars. Vacuum-seal was a concept I never expected to master in this life or any other. But we vacuum-sealed our apples together, my husband doing the boiling of the glass jars. It snows, we eat the September applesauce and it occurs to me that family experience is not a two-week vacation. Perhaps it’s something you pick up from the ground, carry in a basket, boil on a stove, eat four months later while wind howls.

We haven’t gotten a new computer. We don’t use the one we have much anymore. In Los Angeles, where our friends were an hour and a half away, it was easier to communicate in cyberspace with people in Michigan or Arkansas. No one in this family is online anymore. We are not living screen lives, with pseudonyms and assorted fictions. We pass our frozen pond that’s embroidered by deer and bear and rabbit tracks, and the ground is telling us a story. At some point in the last six months, we stopped living in virtual reality and walked out into a real world.

We didn’t get a second phone line, either. We began to enjoy knowing who was calling and why, what the events of their lives were and how they effect us. Of course, we have extensions in our bedrooms, but it’s surprising how little we use them. I know what my 14-year-old daughter is thinking on a level of intricacy and detail I would never have imagined possible or even considered desirable in Los Angeles.

I fell in love with this house for subliminal reasons and associations, for an entire subconscious architecture. Perhaps I sensed that a family is an organic symbiotic unit inhabiting the same physical reality in real time. It is not distinct existences stuck like bad skin grafts in an illusion of shared space. When you have separate wings to your house, separate schedules, activities, amusements and commitments, “family values” is a sound bite that doesn’t resonate.

We live two country miles from the college--one road without a traffic light. My husband comes home for lunch. Or we meet in town. I go to lectures at the university: psychology, science, history. I go to the art gallery, the music and theater events. I’m taking a drawing class. I’m learning to identify birds. I’m learning to recognize the moods of my adolescent--how to read her face, which is a fast forward epic. Sometimes we drink tea in the afternoons and I stay current, know who she eats lunch with, can name her favorite bands. I ask. I pause and hear. We listen to music. We take turns. We read poetry out loud in front of the fireplace. We argue. We laugh. We debate.

I didn’t have energy for that sort of thing in Los Angeles, where I spent inordinate amounts of time thinking about my career and people I didn’t know or even want to know--Courtney Love, Michael Douglas, Michael Stipe, Princess Di. I was defined by the media, the way the alley walls of Los Angeles are embossed with graffiti, the way oranges hang above the fences like blind lanterns. It was in the air and it was in me. I lived with a view of gouged stucco. I practiced not seeing. My teenager was intrusive and inconvenient, so I encouraged her to be physically distant. We spoke in passing, in fragments. We might as well have been grunting.

I’m often asked, here in the Allegheny Mountains, if I’m in culture shock, if this rural enclave seven hours from Boston is an overwhelming transition. I say no. Los Angeles was the shock. Los Angeles required the constant translation and adjustment. This is the house where I have always lived. In this town, they speak a dialect in which I am fluent. And I have at last and finally come home.