xtcian

if these walls could shut up

7/12/04

Sure, that may look like graphamaniacal gibberish to the uninitiated, but it is actually the deed to our farm, drawn up in 1845 for George T. Burton. Full disclosure: Tessa and I took a little trip to the Clerk's office for Columbia County, and just kept on looking up deeds for our place.

It goes like this: your house deed will tell you where the previous deed is – usually in another book, on a certain page. Keep doing this, and you go back in time. First you'll see nice computer print-outs, then neat typewritten forms, then old shitty Smith-Corona typewriters, until you get to the good stuff, written with a fountain pen dipped in dye.

The town library had a "find your historic house" night, so we took our deeds there, and discovered the history of our land going back to 1770. I wanted to know two things: "who built our house in the 1830s?" and "can I see a picture?" I was unsuccessful, but tantalized.

The nice thing is that everybody who inhabits our farm house stays in it forever (we are only the sixth owner since our country was founded) and usually dies peacefully inside it. This happened to ol' George Burton, ol' J. Palmer and even Virginia Nelson, a woman whose bearded irises still bloom in our garden six years after her death at 86.

I wondered what George T. Burton, who died in his sleep in 1877, would have thought of us watching the second season of "The Shield" in his bedroom. He probably thought the scene with that Mexican druglord getting his face fried on the stove was a bit over the top. Also, he probably wanted to know how CCH Pounder, a black woman, could be a police officer. Oh, and he'd like to know the name of the magic box that produced such wonderful images.