No Time for Tea

It was an oddly built house, two stories set securely into the hillside at the very top of Schoolhouse Lane but with a glassed in sunporch on stilts on the front. It looked and felt off kilter, as if the supports might just uproot in a strong wind and set the entire house tumbling down the impossibly steep incline and into the sea.

“What nonsense!” my grandmother said briskly, “I declare, that house has stood fifty years and will stand for another fifty!”

Still, after Uncle Len had remarked that the structural integrity of the house was compromised, it was hard not to notice that she kept her visits brief and took pains to avoid the sunporch. She denied this lack of faith often and loudly, of course, but there it was.

“No time for tea!” she would say brightly, drop off a basket of biscuits and jam or fresh honey and hastily shuttle me out the back door. When it came to the house on Schoolhouse Lane, she was always on her way to somewhere else and running late.

Miss Hilda, however, who passed the house twice a day on her morning consititutional, was far less inclined to be tactful.

“A horror, Alice,” she would say through clenched teeth, “An absolute architectural, L shaped horror, there's simply no other civilized way to put it. I shall never understand what they could have been thinking to make such an abject failure of a proper sunporch! It's a blight on the landscape.”

“I Imagine they were thinking of the view,” Nana would suggest mildly and Hilda would snort with disapproval.

“Perhaps the view will be adequate compensation when those spindly stilts give way and the whole structure collapses like a house of cards,” Hilda would reply haughtily, “ I remain unconvinced.”

The house never did give way to the wind or the storms, not even to the elemental forces of not one but two hurricanes. But long after it's residents and critics were well buried, a night fire swallowed it whole and in time the weeds and wild grass reclaimed the ground. Last time I was home, I stopped on the road above where the house had so proudly stood. Not a remnant remained except the view.