Luck of the Draw

When we first arrived at this place hugging the lake, or hugging the land, and either could be argued, we had a magnificent red oak crowning the front yard. Several years later, to our sad surprise, one evening our prize oak gave up unannounced and unscheduled, dropping its four feet girth across the street. Lights went out the entire length of the street. Took down two poles and transformers along with the phone, cable, Fios lines. Silence reigned.

There are but two ways in or out of the neighborhood, which gives us privacy and occasional challenges as when trees fall. Snow storms are always fun on these hills. That night, I stood in the roadway, explaining to more than one driver they’d have to go the other way. I remember several who kept studying the tree like it had landed from Mars—no, just over there—or perhaps thinking if they waited long enough, the tree might levitate. We aren’t all in top form when nature surprises.

The entire neighborhood was duly annoyed. Somewhere past 3am, VDOT arrived and sawed the street free. Though we had to pay a tree company following after to cut the carcass into crane-sized sections to haul away. By early morning Dominion Power had erected poles and restrung their lines. Verizon and Cox Cable crews were working by that afternoon. Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic, nee Ma Bell) got their Fios working within the day, but our Verizon land line stayed dead for several weeks—we got the message—mega-corporations aren’t particularly subtle.

The next day I met our new neighbor across the street, who was arriving home from a trip. Driving up, window down, he was chatting on his cell phone. Surveying the upper half of the oak still filling his front yard, then seeing me smiling broadly, he told his cell friend person he needed to call them back. Which was how he and I met—not cute. Feeling guilty, we did pay the tree company to clean up his yard. Rob took it well enough; the fact the tree crushed his three-log fence didn’t upset him, or so that we knew. However, he did set out an electrified bobbing reindeer on his lawn for Christmas to annoy me, but that’s another story.

Soon enough we were doing Friday nights with him and his wife, Debbie. And when Molly the Rottweiler came into our lives—by D pulling her from the lake—we conned Rob and Debbie to work with Pam, our dog whisperer—who called Molly a rotten-wieler—on how to better behave, though it never worked on Rob.

From that original tree, we now have easily half a dozen red oak descendants. The previous year, before it gave up the ghost, the red oak had gone through an amazing masting, raining acorns across the entire front yard. Some days we dodged acorns walking out the front door. We made sure to park the cars under the carport while it was going on. I wondered, did the tree understand its time had come?

We’ve wished all the saplings welcome. When the beaver gnawed down a very shapely sapling six inches from the ground, I let the stump be. It had already grown to 2” caliper size and was well established before my fat, flat-tailed nemesis chewed its head off. The following year, I was surprised to find the stump sending up two tentative shoots, and now we have a low-branching sapling. It’s recommended not to plant low-branching trees which tend to be inherently weaker, but I’ll be dead before it gets that large. Meanwhile I’m cheering for it to grow to as righteous as its predecessor.

We live under a canopy of trees. The entire neighborhood does, and the trees are what first attracted us. Our first house in Lake Barcroft was well up from the lake, but it had trees in abundance. Since the lake began life as a water reservoir upstream from Alexandria, the perimeter rambles following the ridge lines as do the roads—and grades. Bought from the private water company, the lots were sold individually, the grades for each were left to the imagination, and the trees weren’t scraped wholesale by earthmovers.

The neighborhood loses trees to attrition from old age and storms, but the homeowners’ association offers replacement trees in a yearly program. Without the tree canopy, we might as well be one more boring stretch of suburbia.

But droves of cyclists love cranking on the quiet roads in the hills, flashing beneath a shady canopy.

And we now have a volunteer peach tree in the red oak’s place reaching sunward. From a peach pit dropped by a construction worker is our best guess—who would ever want to deliberately plant a peach tree this far north? But the peach tree works as hard as the red oak that used to rain acorns, and this newest neighbor puts out desperately small fruit, no fault of its own—it wanted to grow in Georgia.

Luck of the draw.

House on the Point—photo by William E Evans, © 2021

House on the Point

The building permits were posted a week ago on the site of the landmark house I had first seen from our canoe, paddling east from where we lived on Stoneybrae Drive. In the distance on a Sunday morning Ryan and I studied the modest white house. Something about the way it sat on the low point of land, two old oaks shading it, caught both our attention.

The site of any manmade abode is easily the better part of its raison d’étre. Architects who ignore the site are egoists, and their work is rarely complete. Philip Johnson was the 20th Century’s premier egoist, yet his glass house in New Canaan sits in brilliant opposition to its site. Without the pure lines of the natural site, the house would be lacking. His ego lay in the walls of glass, and the site absorbed them.

The little white house sits well back, much further from the street than its neighbors, and is visible across a long, opening lawn. It has a sly entry drive that threatens to disappear off into a small forest before it curves back to arrive at the house with the subtlety of a master dramatist.

The house had been, by all accounts, abandoned years ago, yet we understood someone had bought it. It surely has one of the longest views—looking down the long leg toward where Holmes Run flows into the lake. In 2013, when our own project was just being framed, I got a call from the owner inquiring how we’d made it through the County’s permit process (worthy of a story in itself). The owner said he had an architect, when asked. Seeing as I had renovated the little white house in my head multiple times until I could describe it in a poem. Something about its potential made me think of the work of a Texas firm, Lake Flato

Except for where it sits, the little white house is nothing to write home about, a modest, one-story with screened porch and a garage separate from the main structure. All white, though now with green vines taking over. The garage door is raised six or so inches; seems it was left that way, and the number of creatures finding shelter inside over the years would take a book to describe.

Remembering that canoe trip with Ryan much later, I wrote the poem: Dreams of Living on a Point .

So now it’s soon to be demo’d down to its foundations, according to the building permit. But come this Friday, the Lake Barcroft community is holding a lakeside salute to the long standing landmark. Weather permitting, we hope to be on board. Memory is a strange emotion—and stranger still is how we hold to it.