This summer I plan to finish painting my house and it won’t be a moment too soon. When I started scraping, it was just Angela and me and our dog Sammy. Now that I’m almost finished, Sammy is long gone and we have two kids, one of whom is old enough to recite the Robert Frost Poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” from memory. There have been moments up on the ladder, summer after summer, scrapping lead paint, sunburned, knuckles bleeding, when I think I must be stuck in some twisted version of the Count of Monte Cristo, but instead of having to burrow out of a French prison with a spoon, I have to finish painting a charming fixer-upper on Terrace Street. These are the moments when I consider the advantages of vinyl siding.
No scraping. No painting. No worries. No more Saturdays on the ladder. But there’s a problem.
We live in the capitol district of Montpelier, which means that in order to maintain the historic character of the neighborhood, we’re prohibited from putting vinyl siding on our house. I grew up in the Northeast Kingdom where the only thing more historic than the Old Stone House in Brownington was the collective belief in independence regarding land rights and where dictating someone else’s aesthetic decisions was likely to get you run over by a motley demolition derby car. Being told what kind of siding I can put on my house, or what color it should be, smacks of government intrusion and class pretension. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that we sacrifice individual liberties and enter in to a social contract because the natural state of life outside it is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. He didn’t say anything about vinyl siding.
There’s another part of me, however, that appreciates the principled stand of the Montpelier design review board. Essentially, they’ve said that beauty, even if it’s conventional, matters to our community. We value tradition over convenience. Wood over plastic. The authentic over the fake.
Vinyl siding tries to look like something it isn’t, namely, wood siding, but when I buy replacement wooden clapboards from the mill in Mooretown, made on the same belt-driven machine that made them a hundred plus years ago, I know I’m getting the real deal. And the locally harvested wood, sliced into pie wedged strips by a whirling blade that looks to me like the embodiment of truth itself, has a kind of beauty you won’t find in the pressed particle board at the big home improvement center.
So while I’m tempted to demand more freedom and less unity when I’m on my ladder this summer, after I come down, paint spattered and tired, I’ll take pleasure in the beauty and truth of freshly painted quarter-sawn siding.
I’ll also take solace in the aspirational belief that most Vermonters place the same faith in the authenticity of the governmental officials who work in Montpelier as the community does in its clapboards.
