"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
17 January 2005Hitting me where I liveRegular readers (all three of you) will know that shortly after I moved into these semi-swanky digs in the city, I bestowed upon the property the name "Surlywood," which, all things considered, isn't a bad name, even if it is a bit too reminiscent of Lileks' beloved Jasperwood. Not everyone does things like that:
We've never named our houses. We simply distinguish them by referencing the name of the street on which they are located. The one we are in the process of moving to is on a corner lot, and has a separate address for the upstairs apartment, but we do not refer to the place as "Thirtieth".
I spent too many years in apartments which deserved no names — at least, none which are utterable in polite society. Interestingly, the practice in my neighborhood is to denote a house by its color, should that color be distinctive. For reasons unknown, my place is referred to as the "Brown House," despite the fact that very little of it is brown (most of the wood framing is painted some sort of Hello Kitty-esque pink, and at some point before that it was green). Nor was it ever, to my knowledge, owned by anyone named Brown. The yard, however, definitely qualifies as brown, at least for now. Posted at 8:49 PM to SurlywoodMy wife refers to all the houses she's lived in by the street name; I do too but only if I lived in more than one house in a given town. Thus the two homes I remember from childhood are "the house on Broadway*" and "the house I grew up in," respectively. But the ones we lived in up in the Lost Frontier are simply "the house in Fairbanks" and "the house in North Pole" to me. I sometimes refer to the present one, though usually only to myself, as "Glencoggin," referring to the fact it's the second lowest property in the neighborhood and actually has a pretty significant hillside slope in the front yard. (*My mother always referred to this one as "the Crackerbox" because it was essentially a row house. If she intended any reference to redneck neighbors, she never explained it to me.) Posted by: McGehee at 9:57 AM on 18 January 2005I normally don't name residences, but, when I bought my current house, I decided it needed a name. I came up with "Weedhaven" as my first choice, which is still accurate, but as I get more into playing musical instruments, I'm thinking I need to rename the place the "House of Reviled Instruments" (among the instruments I own and am learning to play are banjo, ukulele, pennywhistle, and bodhran). Posted by: wheels at 12:16 PM on 18 January 2005We've never named houses but we sometimes name cars and trucks. Posted by: Lynn S at 12:46 PM on 18 January 2005Wheels, you can't call it that until you also have bagpipes. Posted by: McGehee at 5:05 PM on 18 January 2005And an accordion. Posted by: McGehee at 5:06 PM on 18 January 2005In the rare instances in which one of us needed to be delivered home to our block, which included 23 houses, some of them duplexes, and neglecting a couple of subsidiary apartments, we needed only to say, "It's the house with the red roof," for in that it was unique, and for upwards of 16 years; 60 years on, it may be yet. But we did not name it. The 3 houses we occupied are still designated by us by the house nos. or the street nos. Living in the City is made easier by the facts that most addresses are on numbered streets and that addresses on named avenues bear nos. related to nearby numbered streets. The locations of most homes can be approximated without hesitation once you have learned the names of the N-S section lines and half-section lines. Posted by: Bn. Acton at 11:18 PM on 18 January 2005I don't have an accordion (yet), although I have a friend who plays accordion and concertina. No bagpipes, either, but I do own a couple of books on how to play them and on the piobaireachd. Posted by: wheels at 5:50 PM on 21 January 2005 |