Rico's rants: In the family for months*

Rico says the post title* is a subhead, but a classic, in Joyce Wadler's article in The New York Times about Sherry Lefevre's home in Nantucket (photo):

One never forgets one’s first summer love. Sherry Lefevre’s was named Rosemary. She was ten when she first encountered it: a house built in the early 1800s on Nantucket, where it is customary to give houses names.
Its furnishings were from another era: horsehair sofas with stiff velvet and threadbare Oriental rugs. Ms. Lefevre’s bedroom under the eaves had a tall dark chest with an array of things on top she had never seen before: a china perfume tray, a monogrammed dresser set, a box of collars. There was also a mysterious upstairs bedroom, accessible only through a bedroom her parents used.
At school, back home in Philadelphia, Ms. Lefevre was immersed in the literature of the nineteenth century: Hardy, Brontë, Melville. In this house, it was easy to believe she was part of that world. She imagined stories from the house’s past, that the back staircase led to “an insane wife, hidden away, her meals smuggled up the stairs”, as she writes in a book she hopes to publish.
Ms. Lefevre would have loved to inherit such a house (an heirloom house, as she calls it), full of well-loved antiques, but Rosemary was a rental. Three summers and it was gone. Then, two years ago, Ms. Lefevre, an assistant professor of writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and a mother of two grown children, came into an inheritance, and was able to buy her own old house on Nantucket. Within a few months, she writes, she turned it into an instant heirloom house, filled with the sort of memorabilia that might have been passed down for generations: seashell art pieces, seascapes, converted whale-oil lamps, antique fabric drapes, bureaus, and beds sweetly hand-painted with clutches of faded flowers.
Ms. Lefevre estimates that the cost of furnishing the house was about $15,000. There have been some concessions to comfort (no horsehair sofas). But over all, the furnishings are worn, weathered, and redolent of seasons past.
“Why did my family’s summer house have to be old?” Ms. Lefevre writes in the manuscript she is calling The Nantucket House That eBay Built. “Because Rosemary was. Because I wanted a house that contained layers of memory, making it as otherworldly as summer. Because the nauseatingly maudlin motto of The Velveteen Rabbit is true, more or less: to become real, a house needs to show some wear, some shabbiness, some misshapenness, some evidence of love and life.”
While Ms. Lefevre’s heirloom house is filled with other people’s summer vacation mementos— their discarded souvenir plates, their Nantucket lighthouse postcards— that does not lessen the power of the items for her. “There is something in particular about summer that is poignant, because we all know that when we are in summer that we are in a fleeting moment that will become part of memory,” she was saying one recent steamy day on Nantucket, when thunderstorms threatened, but thoughtfully held off until day’s end. “Memory in summer is always stronger because we need it to get through the rest of the year. You know what I mean? For me, getting things that are old or things that remind you of everyone else trying to hold on to the good life makes everything kind of deeper.”
Ms. Lefevre, 58, is a trim woman, friendly, articulate, and sometimes quite funny. She slaps together a sandwich for a guest in the offhand manner of a woman who has made thousands of summer sandwiches for children while dealing with more important things: figuring out the next semester’s teaching plan, perhaps, or how she will pay the bills.
When it comes to telling her life story, she is guarded. “I don’t want this to be a psychological profile,” she says early on.
But, on the subject of summer houses and their influence on the families that spend time there, she is happy to talk. Her childhood sounds happy. Her father was a lawyer; her mother a homemaker. Ms. Lefevre, one of four children, attended what she describes as a prim girls’ school in Philadelphia.
One of the great pleasures of her childhood was the house called Rosemary, which she can recall down to the smell. “It was very musty,” she says. “It smelled of the sea. It basically rambled, but in a wonderful way. It had an old kitchen that was very haphazard, with curtains instead of cabinet doors. The floors in the place were just totally wonky. They were like being in a heaving ship. So we used to roll things like little trucks and see how fast they would go from the living room, downhill to the kitchen, downhill to the laundry room.” She continues: “I do think certain houses get inside kids. They live half in fantasy anyway. Though I never was in a house that had that kind of atmosphere. It stayed with me forever.”
Ms. Lefevre was educated at Princeton, then Columbia, married, taught in Lebanon for a time, then divorced and returned to Philadelphia, where she raised her children, Michael, now 22, and Callie, now 24, on her own. Life as a single mother was not easy. For a while, she was an adjunct professor at three different colleges, teaching days, nights, and summers. Nantucket, where her parents had bought a modern ranch house on three acres with an ocean view in the 1970s, was a respite.
A few years ago, after her parents sold the house and divided the money among Ms. Lefevre and her siblings, she began a search for her own home on the island. Her children were growing up, and she wanted a house that would create memories for the families they would one day have, as Rosemary had for her. She also realized that one sure way to see more of your adult children was to buy a vacation home.
She was looking for an old house that had not been gut-renovated, one that retained its history. In July of 2009, she found a house in town that, she later learned, had been owned in the 1800s by a man named Samuel Robbins, a first mate on a whaling ship who died at sea. She paid the asking price of $1.15 million and brought in her Philadelphia carpenter, Pat Clark, who lived there while he worked. The total cost of the renovations, which included installing two bathrooms, removing a wall between the kitchen and a den, and putting in additional walls upstairs, came to about $53,000.
Finding the right old furnishings was essential. Ms. Lefevre had discovered eBay only a few years earlier, when a nephew had his heart set on a particular toy. “It was a gorilla that sings, I don’t want to work, I just want to bang on my drums all day,” she says. “It cost me ten dollars, and it made my nephew happier than I could have imagined. Then I realized, anything that you hadn’t seen for so long that you missed, anything you remembered as a kid, you could get on eBay.
“When I was a kid, my brother had given me a rubber cigar that, when you blew on it, a worm popped out at one end. So I went on eBay and typed in ‘rubber cigar worm,’ and there it was. And it was one of those crazy moments where you say: ‘Oh, my God, everything that has been lost to me can be recovered.’ ”
What Ms. Lefevre remembered and missed was the kind of house we were sitting in, she is told. “Yeah,” she says. “It was a big version of a cigar with the worm coming out. A very expensive version. Too bad I didn’t quit when I was ahead.”
Ms. Lefevre bought furnishings for her house in an organized way. She is an academic, after all. She started by writing down her associations with Nantucket and other seaside resorts. She gave herself guidelines: bedside tables and bookcases could not cost more than $100 each; rugs could be no more than $200; lamps could not be more than $50 (not including the conversion kits for the whale-oil lamps, which were about $12).
She discovered ways to find things she could afford. Visit homes on Nantucket, she says, and you will find that owners with deep pockets have a fancy painting of a ship. But a nineteenth-century painting like that could cost several thousand dollars. Seascapes without ships in them, she realized, were much cheaper: most of hers cost two hundred dollars or less.
Ms. Lefevre also longed for sailor’s valentines from that era, framed shell compositions often containing hearts and flowers. Online, she found them for $3,500 to $18,000. But when she typed “antique shell art” into eBay’s search engine, she found she could buy seashell art and objects for less than a hundred bucks.
Whenever she could, she picked up furniture herself, instead of having it delivered, to reduce shipping costs. Sellers along Interstate 95, her route from Philadelphia to New England, were preferred, and she quickly discovered that better deals could be found in Rhode Island than in Connecticut.
Her big-ticket items were a $700 counter for the kitchen and a seascape for $500. (It doesn’t have a ship, but it was signed by the artist, Alex Mortimer.) She also found a portrait of a prosperous-looking fellow for $200 and pretended he was the deceased whaler who had once owned her home, whom she promoted to captain.
Not everything was bought on eBay. The faded flowered sofa and matching chairs in Ms. Lefevre’s living room are from the vacation house of Gerry Sills, the mother of a friend. And the mattresses are all new (she paid $1,100 for four, at a furniture outlet in Morgantown, Pennsylvania.). But most things are old, even if, as with the drapes, they are made to measure from old fabric.
She has found she enjoys the personal nature of eBay shopping; the stories of the people she deals with online and of the objects themselves. On the dining room wall, there is what appears to be a homemade version of a sailor’s valentine under glass, with tiny shells set in dried clusters of seaweed. Ms. Lefevre bought it on eBay for $125. “I had this very funny experience,” she says, taking the piece down and putting it on the table. “I made an arrangement to pick it up on I-95, on the way here. The owner said: ‘Call me when you hit exit such-and-such,’ and I met her in the parking lot of a supermarket. It was like a drug deal. I opened my trunk, and she opened her trunk. I didn’t want her to ship it. I think this is old and real.” It certainly seems old. The seaweed looks as if it could turn into dust if the glass were removed. The inscription, in gold-colored ink, is so faded that only part of it is legible. Ms. Lefevre and the reporter study it, trying to decipher it. Call us not weeds, we are flowers of the sea, for lovely and gay tinted are we, she reads. And quite independent of sunshine and showers. Then call us not weeds, we are ocean’s gay flowers. The story of the sailor who bought it, and of the person he gave it to, is unknown. But it may be something about which Ms. Lefevre’s grandchildren, yet unborn, will dream.