Oh, Captain! My Captain!

We live in a house that was built in 1920….by a Sea Captain so the story goes. I must admit that I find this incredibly romantic. Some of the features of our house would indeed seem to support it being built by a bachelor seaman. The upstairs alone seems to echo the hold of wooden ship and the closet in our bedroom is unlike any I have ever seen and would be right at home in a cabin on a ship. The handles of the drawers below it are also made of sturdy, mariner type rope. Pay no mind to the fact that we live about 2 hours from the coast (but not that far from Shanghai City – Portland ). These ‘facts’ coupled with the extreme abundance of pink flowering things in our yard makes me wonder…. I have a secret fantasy about the Captain. I like to think that perhaps he loved to garden and loved pink and had to move far and away from where anyone would know him so that he could retire in peace with his pretty pink things. Now I realize that the antithesis of a Sea Captain would be a gardener/farmer but I think we all hold the capacity within ourselves to be walking contradictions in terms (I seem to pump up against my own daily). We might keep some of our less obvious, more contradictory traits to ourselves but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t part of what makes us who we are. Maybe even more so in 1920 I would think. It is likely that some of the less expected, more pink characteristics of man might be frowned upon. Especially here in Oregon in 1920. I also wonder what the landscape must have been like around where we live in 1920. There would have only been the 2 houses; our house and the slightly older one about ¼ mile away (now they are both besieged by a seemingly endless sea of 1960’s ranch houses). I can only imagine the views and the pastoral peacefulness of it then. A very fine place to retire in relative anonymity and peacefulness with your pink roses and pink rhododendrons and pink peonies, etc.. Realistically I know that all the pink was far more likely the legacy of a gardening wife who lived in the house after or that it is even possible that the Captain had a wife and she is the culprit but that is no fun at all, now is it? I am also somehow more able to be more forgiving of all the damn pink when I believe it is the legacy of the Captain.