The house and the tree

This house feels huge, it’s kind of hard to explain. Huge in the sense that it could comfortably house seven people without much investment, or in the sense that its living room is probably as big, if not bigger, than the apartment where my wife and I currently live in. At the moment, other than me coming home a few times a year, no one else uses it besides my parents. But it wasn’t always like this, and it’s a bit of a mystery as to why this changed.

I remember so many good things from when I lived here, and can only feel lucky for having lived here a good part of my life. Of course there were bad times, hard times, but none of that can erase all the good it did for me. Every time I look out from the window in my room, I see trees and green and clouds and sun and pretty much nothing else. To be able to still call this place home, in some sense, is to know that the world can still be good, it’s my roots, my anchor in this world.

There’s this picture of the five of us in that huge living room. It was taken more than twenty five years ago, at the birthday party of my younger sister, and she’s still a baby there, super cute. My parents look younger of course, and my older sister and I are probably not as cute as a small child, but we are still quite dandy. Everyone’s smiling, and looked genuinely happy, picture perfect. I remember we had guests that day, most of my family was over to celebrate the birthday, and I could play with my cousins, in a sunny summer day, how could I not be happy and cherish this.

Again, it’s kind of hard to explain how huge this place feels, it’s not like this a McMansion, but the amount of open space it has is kind of baffling. Even though the architect had good ideas on how to fit its rather boxy design in the landscape and on which materials to use, there were some capital mistakes in his conception of the inside. There is a beautiful hall that connects both the three main rooms downstairs with a huge portion of the upstairs. This rather central area of the house is a single block of air with a lot of windows facing south. I love the amount of light it lets through but, aha, our capital mistake, it makes it much harder to heat in the winter and cool in the summer. And the winter is harder to bear than the summer, thankfully those are still relatively mild for Portuguese standards. Hindsight is twenty twenty, but I only figured all of this in twenty twenty five when I could see my own breath inside the bathroom.

We had, and I’m sad to have to use the past tense here, a beautiful pine tree at the back of the house, right across the window from my room. A huge tree, it was already here when the house was built. The architect was able to the tree beautifully. Making use of the fact that the terrain sits at a rather steep incline, by using lots of stone to create supporting walls he was able to make the surroundings of the house mostly plain.

I’m sad about the pine. Unfortunately, through the years, it started to grow crooked, and it would sooner or later create a problem, as this huge tree would fall over part of the house, roof included. These are the hard decisions you have to make sometimes. Both my wife and I said goodbye to it, when we were here a few months ago. Part of the roots are gone, but others are growing to take its place, there’s lots of good trees slowly becoming what that bulwark once was for this place. A sense of continuity.

I made a promise to the pine’ and I’m thinking about it on Christmas Eve. Since it had been here before us it deserved to know that I would do my best to keep the rest alive. I sincerely hope that I can keep this promise, I do feel like that there’s something in this place that needs to be cherished and taken care of. And I’m hopeful for the future, which is exactly how I was back in the days when that photo was taken.

Us, the house, the pine tree, we are all depicted there, put inside a frame on the shelf of the huge living room. The pine is gone, the family element is for sure much more reduced, and the house needs renovations. There’s reasons to be sad about it. But it’s also an opportunity to think about what we value and how we can bring that to life again. Pruning roots is a necessary process to spur growth.

This year marks my first Christmas without that pine tree, there must be some symbolism there.