I painted the porch today with my host. We scraped the old paint and bleached it in preparation for the primer. I was glad to be outside with him because the hostess had blown up at us about eating food in the house without asking for permission first. This made me feel like I was in a place where I wasn’t wanted and I was irked, but even more upset about how it hurt my girlfriend. She doesn’t take scolding very well.

We were out in the 98 degree weather painting the floorboards and he starts to tell me the story behind the house. I love these kinds of stories: the histories of places that I’ve been or lived in. He tells me that the person who built the house had a father who was an engineer and had eventually made a lot of money working on a railroad back when this was the newest mode of transportation. The son built the house with the money he inherited. And his last name was the same as my last name.

This gave the story even more of an appeal to me. I was not born in this country and I do not have a common American last name. So when he told me that he read the biography of this man and has the book above the fireplace in the living room, I became excited to read it. The house was passed down in the family until it was sold to another family. This is when my host had first seen the house. As a young man he was hired one summer to do painting around the house. The last time he had painted that very porch, in fact, was 35 summers ago.

As an older adult, and after living in Boston for years, he came back to visit his parents and noticed a picture of the house for sale in the window of a real estate office. He was curious and asked about it. The current owner, a grandson of the person he had painted for, had been lazy and the house was a wreck. It takes a lot of work to keep a big estate like this one maintained and potential buyers were scared away by the cost and effort it would take to do repairs. The entire heating system needed to be updated and there was a lot that needed to be redone.

My host knew the potential of the place. He knew the gorgeous 80-something acres it sat on. He knew the history of the place. So he bought it.

With a crew of professionals the house was brought to living standards. The interior designer loved the place, and stayed. This was the woman who would become my hostess this summer. His lady.