Looking for something else this morning, I found the plans John drew for the house we built almost 4 decades ago. I thought the plans were somewhere else but I wanted the file of information on our property, our well, and anything else that would help me remember the process of day-to-day building. I am working on something about my grandfather, using a file of receipts and scraps of paper related to the house he built in Beverly, Alberta, in 1946. I am also trying to find information on the house he might have grown up in, a house in the village of Ivankivtsi, near Kitsman, in what’s now Ukraine. I’m not sure I’ll find that house but down the rabbit hole of searching on the Internet, I came upon a site devoted something called Museum of the Multitude Village, located in Valyava, not too far from Ivankivtsi, and it seems to have been founded by a man called Vasily Kishkan, who was a writer. Here’s one of the exhibit rooms of the museum:
What does this mean? I’m not sure but maybe I’m on the trail of…something. In trying to reconstruct the process of building our house, of my grandfather building the house I took my granddaughter to over Easter, maybe I will be able to build something new that uses materials from both these constructions. Something durable, with an old comforting patina.
I see from the copy of the drawings John did for our house and then the additions we built in later years that the language of building is a language dense with meaning, if you need it to be.
I will have to determine the scale appropriate to this strange compulsion I have to find my grandfather’s life in two countries, or three, if you count the US, where he first arrived from Europe, and worked, before drifting to Alberta. And I will also have to figure out the code.
Seeing this stamped on the plans reminded me that everything we did had to meet the building code and when we went to lumber yards or talked to plumbers or other tradespeople, the term, “to code”, came up so often that it lost its mysterious context and just became part of our regular speech. Is it to code? Has the code changed?
Yes, I think the code has changed but I’m determined to figure it out, at least with enough familiarity that I can understand what a museum of the multitude village might be.
...Theresa Kishkan 