Under the Eaves

I’m rapidly reaching the point where I’m going to have to emerge from this apartment cave and head out into the great beyond to capture more images. But, until such a time is necessary, you’ll have to indulge my whims and fancies as it pertains to history.

There’s a certain minimalism that you see in the roofline picture above. The tiles overlapping just so, oriented towards a mortared apex jutting skyward offset the textured, white stucco underneath. Three circular tiles, nearly hidden in the shadows, add a perspective of depth to an otherwise underwhelming composite of Spanish-style architecture.

What you don’t see is just as important. There’s been an entire residing of this portion of the house, the bedrooms having their walls ripped down and insulation, board, interiors, and exteriors replaced. The roof has been fixed where tiles have cracked and worn and water has leaked through, no doubt due to its age and the relentless march of time. Nature, too, has had her way with it, finding the seams and cracks, the hill that this house is built on slowly sliding down towards in gravity’s gentle caress.

This was my house for my nascent years, my life firmly established underneath those ceramic eaves. Behind that white stucco was the hope and dreams of a child, adopted into the heady mess of white, middle-class, Southern California suburbia. The memories could fill pages, I suppose.

Underneath those eaves, the swallows would return every year, making their messes of mud and guano, spilling their lives out onto the concrete and wood patio below. We used to celebrate their return every year with a parade in downtown San Juan Capistrano and, even with the parade being retired many years since, people still remember that legacy. They were a tiny but significant blip in the story of this place.

Time marches on. My adoptive father passed in 2006, suddenly, and my mother set about renovating the spaces he’d occupied. This renovation was messy, the consequence of greedy contractors, shoddy workmanship, and perhaps the over-eagerness of a life that wanted to be lived differently. It resulted in a lawsuit, a victory, a remaking, and a rebuilding. It became “different” from what it once was, bones still intact, but more personal to the woman who occupied it.

I’ve walked down this memory’s lane not only for the chance to highlight history but, perhaps, to remind myself of how the ordinary can reflect the extraordinary.

You see, it’s never been about how the house looks. Sure, while I appreciate this neo-Mediterranean homage to Spanish red-tile roofs and white stuccoed nonsense, the swallows that nested under the eaves were more formative in my memory than anything else. The fact that every spring, mud and shit would be splattered on the concrete below, the faintest chirping of tiny, seemingly insignificant birds echoing across the wood and stucco resonating like nature’s dinner chime, stirs the reliving in me. These are the moments that stick with you, the memories that bide the test time.

Ah, dear souls, this is what life is all about. It’s not about the edifices or colours; it’s not about the geography or the weather as it was yesterday or today. It’s about the stories told from within, from the sheltered enclaves of wood, brick, stone, and concrete. It’s the chirping from the rafters, the spattered mud of nature’s play, and the resonance of what-once-was.

Find your eaves, find your moments in histories long since past, and revel in the beauty of those moments. We don’t have much time, you and I, to come back to where we once were so, each picture, each memory becomes sacred to the story of us. I pray you never let these moments pass you by.

May it ever be so.