Hilltop Still-life
I have started to pack for our trip East next week. Truth be told, I already sent a box of clothes to Ithaca so that we don’t have to lug so much back and forth in the car. God knows, I have enough summer clothes out here since it is summer all year long as I see it. Putting a week’s worth of roadtrip clothes in a leather satchel took all of ten minutes, most of it deciding what t-shirt statements I wanted to display on my chest in Uber-liberal Ithaca and Uber-liberal Brooklyn. I will stay fairly politically anonymous while on the road because we will be traveling through the far redder center of the country and there is no point in making a bold statement while buying gummy bears in Missouri. The process of packing has made me think about the fact that we will be abandoning our hilltop for five weeks and that suddenly feels like a long time to leave the place alone.
I awoke with the thoughts of abandoned properties in my head. It brought to mind a visual image of Varykino in the Urals of Russia. Varykino is that fictitious town from Boris Pasternak’s incomparable epic, Doctor Zhivago. It’s the place that Zhivago and Lara escape Moscow to and arrive in the winter at Lara’s great-grandfather’s old country house. That frozen marvel of a house is a cinematic memory we all share. The house itself was a cinematic creation meant to mimic the Dairy Queen domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square. That iconic symbol of Russia was built by Ivan the Terrible in 1560 and, strangely enough, does not in any way conform with or resemble any of the other Byzantine architecture of Russia from that era. And yet, it is the most recognizable symbol of Russian architecture and the symbolic “flame” of the Russian state. If you are David Lean and you are trying to match your Wow Factor from Lawrence of Arabia, your last film, you want American audiences in 1965 to instantly relate to a location and he accomplished that with that frozen winter Varykino house, set in vast fields and glistening in the morning sun. The house immediately screamed abandonment. The winter setting with the indoor and outdoor faux icicles and snow (all chemically recreated in the Spanish summer countryside by the art director) gave a sense of suspended animation and pristine stasis.
I am not expecting to get back here in mid-July and find my hilltop home covered in snow and ice. Thanks to our valiant Mexican cleaning crew, who will come to clean the place before we return, I doubt there will even be a layer of dust. In fact, we are using our absence to have the industrial-strength carpet/upholstery cleaners come and give all the soft surfaces a good scrubbing. We are also having a window washer come to do the windows, inside and out. In other words, the house should be spic and span when we return. Nonetheless, it feels funny leaving the house to fend for itself for so long. For eight years we owned the house and only visited a few times per year, so it was left to sit by itself for long periods of time and it did just fine. We have spent the last eighteen months getting the house fixed and tweaked to just where we like it, but I doubt any of that will go to seed in a mere five weeks. Probably the most at-risk part of the operation is the garden and landscape, but with all the effort I have put into the irrigation system and the online control app I use, I can monitor that pretty closely now.
When we used to leave to go back to NYC, not knowing exactly when we would return, we had a protocol for battening down the proverbial hatches of the house. We used to draw all the shades, set the alarm system (something we rarely do when we are in residence) and close the driveway gate (we keep it open when we are in residence). In fact, we have upgraded most of the mechanical shade systems and I just had the driveway gate serviced and the setting changed to allow me to set it up efficiently for when we are home and when we are away. In some ways, we realize that closing the gate is silly. All it does is tell the world that we are away and keep the casual looking-loos from driving up the driveway and mucking about around the property. The truth is that anyone who wants to get into the property can easily walk around the gate through the garden (there is no fence, just cactus landscaping). In fact, anyone who wants to really pillage the place can pretty easily pry open the gate and have their way with the place. I am not telling the world anything the larcenous part of it doesn’t fully understand already. Perhaps my best protection, besides the alarm, is the array of five Ring cameras I have around the place. I find they are most useful to keep track of workmen and their comings and goings, but they are also useful to monitor and permanently record evildoers who might be stalking or robbing our place.
The truth is that we have a pretty stable attitude about our stuff. You get that way when you live your life in Manhattan. Nothing is so precious that it can’t be replaced. We have some artwork and antiquities that are irreplaceable, but I don’t carry the value of any of that on my balance sheet. These are important to us, but very little in the house is more important than the sense of security of NOT having people rummaging around our stuff. Take the TV, it can be replaced. Take your favorite painting, we can live without it….in fact, we are out of place for wall art, so it might even help us refresh the place. I know my friends at Chubb will be good about replacement values for everything. All-in-all, I think we are both pretty good about not being too “stuff” oriented, and that’s a good thing when leaving the place behind for a few weeks.
Meanwhile, we do have Handy Brad on retainer to come up and gather up any mail or packages that slip through our “hold-mail” directives. He will check the place and even walk the property once per week to make sure I don’t lose too much of my plantings to heat stroke or lack of water. He will also do a weekly watering of those few plants not reached by the irrigation system like the ice plants across the road that are technically on the lot across the street (it was our street beautification program). After working on the property in almost every corner for fifteen months, I think it is fair to say that Handy Brad knows the place better than I do. He will keep an eye on everything and take care of anything that needs taking care of.
So, we will drive out the front gate on Tuesday morning, watching to see that the gate closes behind us and head off towards Las Vegas with Betty in her bed (probably asleep before we hit the freeway). A quick glance back at the hilltop still-life will make me feel momentarily wistful and then I will drive away secure in the knowledge that this house knows how to take care of itself just fine.