Of Sinks and Such

Scullery Sink

This is a photo I took of the scullery sink down in the nether regions of Edith Wharton’s famous home “The Mount” in Lenox, Massachusetts. Upstairs there were ceilings with wedding cake moldings and elegant silk settees and Belgian tapestries and French marble mantels, but it was the floor below that captured my imagination. The places the restorers hadn’t gotten to yet.

That’s where the real poetry was.

I loved this sink and wished I could transport it to my own funky 50’s knotty-pine kitchen and replace the stainless steel one that’s there now. I would put old faucets on this beauty and scrub it and pile the dishes in it and let the soapy splashes fly on that zinc surround, and I would wear black aprons over my white summer dresses and dream upstairs/downstairs dreams. Old things can do that to you.

The wall behind this sink is beautiful too with its resurrected collage of plaster, lathe, and stone, no doubt hidden since the house was completed in 1902. It is as mysterious and arresting as a work of art hung in a museum or gallery. I would transport that too and rather than look out a window at a yard, I would look into a deep eloquent past and wonder whose hands built that wall of Berkshire stone. What did he eat for breakfast that morning? Was he singing when he layered it with mortar or was his mind beset with thoughts of paychecks and rents and mouths to feed?

There’s an old house down the street from mine that was recently purchased and redone for the purpose of resale. Now with its spacious tiled showers and chrome appliances and new windows and polished floors and freshly painted walls and opened floor plan, it is, in the eyes of many, quite perfect…expensive and perfect. Wandering through it at an Open House, I found myself instinctively drawn out of the French doors to a small old barn and tiny potting shed in the back yard. Both are cheerfully askew with worn shingles and wooden shutters faded by sun and rain. Both have settled nicely into the landscape with its white hydrangea bushes and wild honeysuckle. Both, I sense, have stories to tell, while out in front, the new old perfect house is strangely mute.

There is, I know, a balance between ruin and upkeep, between neglect and care, between old and new, but for me, the time-worn imperfect things and the long-ago places sing the melodious and pale-tinged music of the heart. My kind of tune.