The Tent On The Wart

We put a tent on the kitchen wart this summer, and it may be the best idea we've ever had. 

 

A "wart," if you're an old New Englander, is any ugly addition you put on an otherwise reasonably attractive house. In our case, the "wart" I'm describing is a deck - that ugly flat projection that landed on New England architecture after emigrating from some part of the country where there are no black flies, no mosquitoes, no deer flies, and sun-worshiping people walk around looking like jerky sticks because they've cured their skin to leather lying out on their sun-burdened decks. When we were building our house, back in the dark ages, we didn't have enough money to erect a screened porch, so we put on a narrow deck as a placeholder, intending to add a screened porch at a future, more moneyed, date.

One year we had the means, and even had the wood, piled up on the far end of the house, waiting for friends to come help build it. Just before the first nail was struck, our out-back neighbor, Eddie B., showed up and said, "Oh, wait; don't do that until I've had time to contemplate this." So the nail guns went down, the six-pack came out, and a beer or two later Eddie lay down on our pile of wood and fell asleep. When he came to  woke up, he said, "I had a vision."

You don't argue with genius. Instead of a porch, we built a many-windowed room with a giant stained-glass window in it, and a lovely room it is.

That, however, was the last moneyed year we've had since. The wart, in the meantime, warped, so in the process of fixing it, it expanded slightly so there'd actually be room to sit on it during the three fall days when there are no bugs, it's still warm enough, and the sun is low enough to not fry our brains. We've had many conversations about how to turn the wart into a porch - most fairly complicated, involving a second-floor balcony, turning a window into a door, and several roof designs - but what it came down to is that there just isn't any way, and that fits our pocketbook perfectly, because there just isn't any money.

This spring, in one of our trips to what we call The Evil Store – you know it, you've been there: you go in for one small thing and come out to pack your car full of stuff you didn't know you needed until you saw it at The Evil Store - there it was, the answer to our over-heated dreams: a screen tent. It was cheap; and it just fit on the wart.

It took some cussing to get the thing erected, but eventually the husband got it up, and between us we managed to hang the screen wall panels without ripping them, though it took three tries (we're artistic people, not engineers - we have more opinions than practical sense). And it's lovely - I can't refer to the deck as "the wart" anymore. I hauled all the folding chairs and rusty bistro tables we've collected out into it, and now, from about 11 am to whenever it starts to cool down, the cat people and hounds spend most days out there - even most rainy days. I'm out there now, writing this on my laptop. 

How much we'll enjoy this tent when we have to take it down before snowfall then put it back up again next spring remains to be seen, but for right now, I'm pleased to have it. It even enchants the night-time deck, which mostly means the solar lights have shadows and lines to play upon. And there's room to spread out a sleeping bag and get some relief on a sleepless hot night.

When I was a youngstah, living in Elkins, my parents had a screened-in porch, and once we were out of school, we kids pretty much lived on it. There we played endless card games, read summer books (comic books!), took naps, and watched storms move in over the lake.  After working in the garden after supper, we'd sit next door on my grandparents' screened-in porch and eat ice cream sandwiches and watch the sun go down over the lake. I spent many hot nights lulled to sleep on that porch, listening to the sound of waves lapping the shore. Screened-in porches are iconic in New England, and finally, I've got one of my own, by gawd!

My houseplants are living on the sunny side of the deck this summer, and the hummingbird feeders are patrolled regularly by the little bully hummingbird who dive-bombs us if I haven't changed the sugar water soon enough. Pansies and petunias, calla lilies, a rosemary plant, a bay tree, a kaffir lime tree, and a tomato in a pot all soak up sun on the deck rails, and climbing sweet peas  and a cucumber vine and sunflowers and gladiolas transform  the foot of the wart-I-can-no-longer-call-a- wart. As the breeze blows, there's the song of the wind-chimes that live by the barn-like structure joining the bird song in the trees all along our mosquito-breeder - uh, pond.  There’s a delicate scent in the breeze of the thyme that has conquered our field.  It's pretty blissful, except that I need to get some comic books; and there's a real danger of -

...szzzzzzzzzznnnzzzz...

Oops, sorry - a real danger of dozing off, I was saying. 

Originally printed in The Concord Monitor, August 11, 2016, as “A Wart No More.”

Photos copyright Charley Freiberg, 2016. Photo of Aroofus Gooptus Barkbender, left, c Deb Marshall, 2016.