Hansel and Gretel and a Bungalow

You Know The Story of Hansel and Gretel, Yes?

It a most fascinating fairy tale.

Not my favorite, but definitely compelling in the questions it raises. Where did the story come from? What had the storytellers seen and experienced, that they concocted such disturbing details? The Grimm brothers made Hansel & Gretel famous, but there are older variations of their story all over Europe and into Russia, with chilling commonalities in both details and themes.  Mostly, I wonder about storyteller motives. Is Hansel & Gretel a cautionary tale? Or is it instructional–a precursor to our modern self-help genre: “Make a Comeback from Medievalism: Breadcrumbs to Success in a Cold, Cruel, Cannibalistic World.”

I think my fascination with old houses was born the moment fairytales were introduced into my consciousness…

From Snow White and her dwarf bungalow sabbatical to Sleeping Beauty’s secret tower installation. Not forgetting (of course) Hansel and Gretel’s confectionary cottage with a carnivorous witch haunting it’s corridors. Seriously…what child wouldn’t fantasize about the grand possibilities of gingerbread houses with sweet embellishments?

And though I’m grown up and mostly responsible now, quaint old houses not only offer the deliciousness of eye candy to me, they also exude a gothic magnetism: What mystery lies behind those doors? What happened to the people who made it their home–fifty, sixty, or two hundred years ago? How did they live and love and die…Were they happy? Had they, as they crossed that enigmatic threshold, finally made their own way home?

When I was a very little girl, my family lived (briefly) in a 1910 bungalow in the tiny town of Sutherland, Nebraska. It had a wonderful, dingy parlor with a French door (glass! You could see through!). It had cut glass door handles that no longer opened (my parents threw them away, to my great distress). It had tall multi-paned windows in the kitchen and huge, heavy solid oak doors that no longer fit in their frames. Both doors and windows had melted somewhat with age; the window glass was wavy, thickening at the bottom of each pane, and the varnish on the massive doors had beaded up into sticky, cracked miniature continents. The basement was scary. Our bedrooms were built into the attic; they opened into a wide hall that encompassed the stair railing. This superfluous space annoyed my mother; it was too wide to just be a hall, but not quite wide enough to be a room. My sisters and I used it as spy headquarters, a place to keep our typewriter and miscellaneous documents. Julia, a baby at the time, was always falling down the long flight of wooden stairs, hitting the heavy door at the bottom of the staircase with a heart-stopping bang. In the summertime, my sisters and I fell asleep in our attic bedrooms,two to a bed (in Nebraska, there were five of us children…eventually there would be eight), listening to locusts singing crazily in the ancient black locust trees at the back of our property. I have wanted something like that bungalow ever since. Though I love the home Frank and I built when we moved to Utah (following breadcrumbs), I still have “This Old House” longings. And honestly, I think I have Hansel and Gretel to blame.