My mother baked bread right before the open house. She wanted the homestead to smell warm and inviting to prospective buyers.
I don’t begrudge those guilders the house as much as I do all the time and effort she put into making that bread. After all, once you sell a house you may no longer call it home.
I forget that no-one outside my hometown knows what a guilder is. Think white trash, with an Adirondack woodchuck vibe. A guilder girl generally loses all her teeth by age 16, and has by then birthed several children fathered by close personal relatives. A guilder boy by age 16 has wrecked several cars, become an alcoholic, and shot up at least one pet or person or (accidentally) himself.
There is abject generational poverty and ingrained ignorance, yes. But it’s willful ignorance, and that’s the defining factor. A guilder is proudly and deliberately coarse and stupid and mean. Guilders work hard to stay so dumb.
They’re not limited to the environs of my hometown, these days.
But I digress.
My parents sold the house I grew up in when I went off to college. The guilders who bought it ran it into the ground. Once the cellar filled with garbage and the sewer backed up and the pipes froze and the electricity got turned off, they scarpered off to trash another one.
Now, pigeons fly in and out of the attic. But, oh, the old Victorian’s bones are still fine, and her slate roof is square and strong. If my siblings and I ever win the lottery, we’ve vowed to bring her back.
I look back at my childhood home and look forward to making bread there again some day. In the meantime, I avoid that street when I visit.
Build your vocabulary! Click here to learn more about guilders.
What a cool house–so sorry to hear it’s in disrepair, especially since you’re one of the most impressive home improvement people I know!
It was a cool house; I still dream about it. My mother spent months and months refinishing all the woodwork — I remember her all one winter, scraping paint off the banister spindles with a toothbrush, using toxic chemicals which are now outlawed (it was damned good stripper, though). With lots of time and money and a staff of professionals, you might still be able to save it. I’ll buy another lottery ticket on Wednesday :-)