Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s Magic: An Ode to an Upside Down House

Yesterday, I closed the sale of my beloved Vashon Island house. The following is my love letter of goodbye.

I cleared away the detritus that collected within your secret places – the copious drawers and cupboards, the handmade armoires, under your beds where sand and dust bunnies mingled with mouse poop. Each book on your bookshelves, each toy crammed into yet another crevice felt weighted with memories. I walked along your beach in a melancholy fog. Our long goodbye hurting my heart in so many ways.

Thirteen years ago, after a charming 20 minute ferry ride from Seattle to Vashon Island and braking my way down an extremely narrow and steep private road, I stepped out of the car, gasping at your view of the Puget Sound and Mount Rainier. It didn’t seem possible that the wooden parking platform, clinging to your steep slope, would hold the weight of one car, let alone five, so I tiptoed across it to follow the realtor down your flaking inlayed stone path to your thick, varnished pine door. Entering your laundry room I was assaulted with your particular odor – cedar mingled with eighty years of chocolate chip cookies, bacon-and-egg breakfasts, and scrubbings with Pine Sol. Transported to my grandparents’ Quebec cottage of a similar 1940s era, I marveled at how two houses, 3,000 miles apart, could share the exact same smell. Memories flooded my mind – my grandmother teaching us where fairies lived within fallen tree trunks along the path to the dock; how to make pine pitch and birchbark canoes; learning to knit; sitting in her lap to read “Paddle To The Sea.” In truth, it was your familiar scent that won my heart.

“Whoever buys this house, it will be an emotional buy,” my realtor had warned me, unable to explain your quirkiness. As I walked behind her from your laundry room toward your kitchen, barely three steps through your front door, entranced by memories I couldn’t explain, I blurted, “I think I just became your emotional buy.”

I toured your rooms, every wall and ceiling lined in cedar. I marveled at the worn smoothness of your tree branch banister, opened many of your insane number of shelves and cupboards, guessing at what they were meant to hold, slid open your kitchen cabinets and pass-through, and crouched to caress your deep amber, two-inch thick ship-deck floors, as if we were already lovers. The kids ran upstairs to your tiny bedrooms, one with a built-in bunkbed and armoire that barely left enough room to turn around, they scuttled up the hill to your whitewashed guest house with pale yellow bathroom, once your kitchen, and claimed it as their secret clubhouse. Your living room, dominated by your huge stone fireplace was expansive, with cedar-lined ceilings that reached 25 feet in the peak, would be a wonderful gathering place. I immediately decided to replace the French doors to the deck that the previous owners had removed, to capitalize on the view of Mount Rainer. With five bedrooms, there was plenty of room for my family and guests to stay, and I imagined many happy family reunions, weekend gatherings of friends, games of Monopoly on rainy afternoons and evening bonfires on the beach. I also imagined hosting healing retreats for widowed people and writing retreats for my writing friends. Though we had barely met, I felt we had known each other forever. I sensed your approval of me too.

I was a still-raw widow and your thick floorboards and your chinked exterior and your familiar odor combined into a house that felt like a resting place where my kids and I would be safe from the bigger world, wrapped up snugly in a bygone era, where we could finally breathe and learn to live again in our upside down world, like Mrs. Piggle Wiggle in her upside down house. I already knew about your other caretaker-lovers, particularly your most famous one, Betty MacDonald, the 1940s Seattle author of The Egg and I and the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle children’s books, and like so many others I was charmed by her funny stories about life and its hardships. I wanted to claim a bit of Betty’s magic for myself. Mrs. Piggle Wiggle lives in an upside down house in a town with many children who come to her to be cured of their bad habits such as tattle-telling, lying, and showing off. Like me, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle was a widow, her husband a pirate who left behind hidden drawers full of money and magical cures, such as a pig who teaches children table manners. What widow could not relate to such a character?!

Betty, Sydney, her daughters Anne and Joan and grandson, Johnny.

Making probably the worst financial decision of my life, I signed the papers and made our union official. You became this widow’s upside down house.

As I hauled my old oak, clawfoot table into your kitchen, I imagined Betty as she sat in this spot seventy-five years ago pounding out words on a noisy typewriter, dragging on a cigarette, a wet dog at her feet. I hoped Betty’s quick-witted writer vibes would, through some form of house-osmosis, instill themselves within me whenever I summoned her writerly presence. The sad reality was that I did very little sitting, let alone writing at your kitchen table.

There was no sitting still within your walls – the many guests Betty loved and complained about were a reality for me too, and I was forever making a meal, or cleaning up from one, making a bed, scrubbing a sink, vacuuming fly bodies that accumulated whenever it was discovered, too late, that a small animal had died inside one of your chimneys. Keeping rats and mice and river otters out of your underpinnings was a constant struggle. I wet-vacced flooded floors and plunged clogged sinks and toilets. I poked screwdrivers into insect infested floors, screaming when hundreds of grubby grey larvae protested. Your Royal Empress trees, planted by Betty and her mom, Sydney, in 1946, according to her book about you and Vashon Island, Onions in the Stew, now loom 50 feet over your roof, their gigantic purple flowers breathtaking in June, and football-sized leaves a nightmare in fall, when they clog your gutters. In winter, I stood on your deck and watched, terrified and helpless as violent torrents of water mixed with 20-foot beach logs pummeled the bulkhead made from half-buried creosote logs filled with cement, forming a girdle that keeps your slope-belly from slipping into the Sound.

That first summer, I cried as I painted your exterior trim a robin’s egg blue, thinking of my husband, my Mr. Piggle Wiggle pirate, knowing how much he would have loved you, imagining him painting right alongside me, overcome with sadness that he wasn’t there to share your beauty and your charm. The money I used to buy you was a piece of him, money I received as a result of his death, like the money Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s husband hid around the house for her. It felt right that from such sadness, joy and healing should result.

Amidst all the running required to keep you healthy, to keep my friends and family comfortable, my cellphone and computer sat idle on your worn terra-cotta tiled kitchen counter and I pretended I lived in a simpler time when technology was an old telephone mounted on your kitchen wall, its outlet still there as proof. Life took on a simplicity that I loved and craved. I purposely didn’t sign up for cable or internet service, and so my kids were forced by boredom to play on the beach. Screen time was limited to an armoire stocked with DVDs and and old TV to play them on.

In keeping with my dream, I shared your upside-down magical cure with others – donating time within your walls to other widowed people and organizations so that many people came to you for a dose of your unorthodox medicine. Even days after a “healing retreat,” I could still feel the healing magic floating in the sunbeam dust every time I unlocked your big wooden door and plunked my groceries on the kitchen table, taking note of the new glass hearts swinging from the chandelier, glinting their colors on the floor.

Your healing magic was particularly poignant on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the day of my husband’s death, when together with my cousin, who was marking her first anniversary of the drowning death of her beloved, we found refuge within your walls. On that day, after a night of literally howling at the full moon from your deck, I awoke to a bird flailing around the bedroom, trying to find its way back out the open window. With a waving arm silly dance, I eventually ushered it to freedom. Later, as my cousin and I walked along the beach, she suddenly burst into a run, shouting, “Whales!” and I sprinted after her just in time to see three orcas lazily dipping, spouting and diving their way around the point. After they passed, we sat on a rock and watched hundreds of tiny silver fish leap from the water, no doubt attempting to escape becoming orca appetizers. As we watched, my son called in a panic to tell me another bird was flapping around the living room and I walked him through the silly dance procedure and he too showed the bird its path to freedom. I hung up shaking my head, marveling with my cousin at the magic of this place, feeling certain our dead partners were responsible for these animal antics.

I was embraced by the families who lived on the beach when on the last Saturday of July, I filled a cooler with wine, plates and cups and carried a casserole dish filled with meatballs, and traipsed along the beach with my elementary-aged kids to a lawn that stretches across three properties, adding my offering to a table groaning with the weight of potluck dishes. At “Beach Bash,” a tradition since 1974, children competed for medals made from shells painted bronze, silver and gold, running three-legged and sack races with their dads and although heartbreaking to watch as a widowed mom, my kids and I soon found ourselves tossing eggs impossible distances to teenagers we barely knew and passing a life saver to strangers using a toothpick clenched between our teeth. It took me years to remember the names of all these neighbors, some of whom I only saw once a year, marveling with each passing year how their babies grew into toddlers and then sack race-capable athletes. My kids, too, grew lanky and eventually became surly teens, but each year, competed and eventually became those teens who gently tossed eggs to the younger children. The sensation of living in a 1940s Norman Rockwell painting was reinforced every July. These families became friends and some became family and if I was ever lonely, I could wander down the beach and be invited in for G&Ts or find someone to share my spaghetti dinner.

Falling in love, I brought my new amour to meet you, excited to share your beauty, share your nostalgia, share your healing ways. We held hands on your deck, sitting in the sun. He swam in January in your frigid waters, his Norwegian blood impervious to the cold. He seemed to embrace the never-ending list of projects and together with my son, whom he taught to wield power tools, built new steps to the beach; he donned a paper suit and crawled under your deck in otter poop to ensure the river otters had left their nest (they hadn’t) before sealing up their hole; he stomped deep into your stinky septic system to slice away tree roots. He even unravelled the mystery of your heated floors – discovering them to be electric and not hydronic – and restored them, and I could almost hear you sigh with pleasure as you warmed our feet. We talked of moving into you full time, when my kids moved away, and so he was motivated to help in your upkeep. But when we bought a house together in Seattle, our focus and effort shifted there. We got engaged and for a while, I envisioned being married on your bulkhead. But the effort of maintaining two old houses became overwhelming, and his gusto and excitement toward you waned. I could hardly blame him. When the opportunity arose to rent you to friends, I took it and so for a few years, my friends took over your maintenance. My dream of sharing you with someone who appreciated you as I did came to an end when we broke up.

In the aftermath of my broken engagement, I asked my tenant friends to give you up, which they reluctantly did, heartbroken, but also grateful for the time they were able to spend with you. I returned to you, sought solace in you, and you held me, steadfast, as always. I mourned yet another loss, reliving my memories and soothing myself with long walks on the beach, reading books in the sun on your deck, and inviting friends for writing dates, where I poured my heart onto the page. Alone for the first time, my grown kids now away living their own lives, I knew I could no longer manage your care by myself. I noticed another piece of chinking in your siding missing, an expensive retaining wall was needed to stabilize your slope, your roof was now coated in moss, powder post beetle infested your main structures. Every time I visited, I noticed another repair that was beyond my ability to do alone and I struggled to find reliable island help. I had to admit to myself that, alone, I was overwhelmed, both physically and financially.

And so I have spent a year bidding you a long goodbye. I have laid in bed, your windows pushed open wide, committing to memory the tinkling of the water raking tiny pebbles against the sand or the roar of waves crashing twenty minutes after a tanker has passed. I have coveted my quiet winter mornings bundled in a blanket on your deck, sipping from my giant clay mug of tea watching the clouds curtsy Mount Rainier, seals playing hide-and-seek just offshore, and eagle pairs flying overhead.

Now, as I take a final walk along the beach with my kids, I realize, they too, must say goodbye to you. You were a piece of their childhood. I remember them as younger versions of themselves, running along this beach, collecting sea glass and shells and poking at the amber jellyfish that wash up onshore in fall. I think of them proudly showing me the teepee fort they built from driftwood and pushing them on the tire swing that hangs from a tree leaning over the water at high tide. Bursting through your French doors, oblivious of their sandy feet, they raced to show me their latest beach treasures — blue beach glass, a bird’s skull, a dried starfish, a heart-shaped rock. Treasures I cherished as I placed them on your dining room’s built-in inglenook plate shelves.

In those years I was proud of my new-found ability to let go of my single-mom’s attempt at order. Betty, I told myself, would have approved of such disorder. She would have put up with the sand in the carpet and the unmade beds as she stirred the 5:00 pm martinis for her and her husband Don. Subbing gin and tonics for martinis, I did my best to emulate Betty’s acceptance of the natural world. As a container against the natural world, you too had to accept disorder, always wary of the inevitable slide toward entropy, always relieved when one of your caretakers cleaned your gutters or yanked roots from your septic system or fortified you retaining walls. My daughter asks if there is a sharpie she can use to etch her name on her built-in bunkbed, feeling the need to leave a piece of herself on you and I recognize the impulse. You have had such a profound impact on us, I wonder our imprint on you?

Your rooms stand empty, awaiting the fixings of a new caretaker, a new lover, and I know you will be in my heart as all the Hallmark condolence cards insist. I will find ways to see my beach family, maybe, until with time, without beach walks to keep us connected, we may drift apart. But I’m not sure how to live your Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s magic life without you. Perhaps the answer lies in this ongoing pandemic that has forced us to simplify our lives and revert back to a simpler time – cooking meals at home, making our own bread, planting seeds for a vegetable garden, discovering our creative talents. Mrs. Piggle Wiggle would have been proud of us all, finally taking note of the simplicity of her wisdom. She recognized and embraced the constant state of chaos of her upside down house and used it, along with a splash of magic to teach children lessons. She laughed in the face of broken windows and tea pots, insisted that gifts of rock-hard cookies were best dipped in tea. It dawns on me that Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s lessons were about tolerance and resiliency, something we could all use right now. Maybe the reward of this life is in the battle it presents on a daily basis. Betty MacDonald, in all her books taught us to accept nature and laugh at life’s pummeling, finding virtue in our own resiliency, turning annoyances into jokes and games.

In trying to guide you, dear house, through the turbulence of rats and overgrown vegetation, slippery clay slopes and logs battering your sea wall, I have emerged feeling as if I have won something. I have guided you, unwittingly, through thirteen years of your history, and along the way, learned to appreciate that life is a constant lesson in embracing change. Although I learned this through becoming a widow at 35 with two small children, as a house, a home, you forced me to relinquish the control I honed in my widowhood that kept my family afloat through the early years. You were Betty’s upside down house and in your upside-down-ness, you uprighted me. A million tiny battles with nature, a sense of living in a simpler time, a de-linking from technology all contributed to making me feel more grounded, more tethered to a world that had somehow escaped me in my grief, floating just beyond reach. And you, for your part stood solid, unmoving, despite being built on an unstable slope, watching silently our laughter, our tears, reminding us in your permanence that nothing is permanent.

Photos courtesy of Shelley Hanna

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