Under One Roof: How a Tough Old Woman in a Little Old House Changed My Life

Over on one wall, next to the couch, there was a whole collection of classic books, like Wuthering Heights and Canterbury Tales and Das Kapital and the poems of Longfellow. They were all dusty, like no one had read them for a long time, but every once in a while she’d quote from them, so I know she read them all, some more than once.

I think that’s one of the things that drew me in. I was fascinated with how much she knew. I guess that’s because I never met anyone who had read as much, who knew as much, as Edith did. It was like meeting someone from another planet. A different kind of intelligence. It just draws you in.

And then, of course, there were the stories. Edith’s stories.

For a guy like me, growing up like I did, you didn’t exactly run into people every day who told you they were Benny Goodman’s cousin. Or who taught Mickey Rooney some dance steps. Or escaped a Nazi concentration camp. Or said they did, anyway.

Here’s exactly what I thought of that, at first:

Wack job.

Not very nice, I know. But that’s where I was at, pure and simple.

But as I started to go over there more often, and heard more and more of the stories – just little bits and pieces of them, just enough to make you wonder – I found myself wanting to hear more. Looking at Edith was a little like looking at those books: a million stories hidden in there. Maybe half of her stories weren’t true. But it was real interesting, just to know they were there.

I was never much of a reader, myself. There weren’t a whole lot of books around my house, growing up. I guess if I was going to school today they would have diagnosed me with attention deficit disorder, because I could never really focus on reading or anything like that. But as it was, I muddled through. I never even watched a lot of movies, to tell you the truth. Take me to a movie theater and I’d be asleep in fifteen minutes. Just couldn’t focus on it. But I did watch a few movies with Edith. She had tons of tapes all around this room as well, all movies from the forties and fifties. Lots of Bette Davis, lots of Sherlock Holmes. A lot of Greta Garbo, too: Grand Hotel, Anna Christie, Ninotchka. Somebody told me they thought Edith was a little like Garbo, holed up here in this little 106-year-old house in a shabby section of Seattle – but they had it wrong.

Edith didn’t want to be alone.

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I was nervous, that first day on the job, walking up to her house. I’d heard so much already. At first I hadn’t been paying too much attention. I’m not that much of a reader, as I mentioned, and I hadn’t seen any of the articles in the paper, or heard about how the local newspaper reporters were all scared of Edith because she’d chase them away whenever they got within ten feet of her. In fact, when I got the job as construction superintendent for the shopping mall project, my wife asked me, “Oh, is that the one where the old lady won’t move?” And I said no, because I was sure I would have heard about it.

But when I mentioned it to the guys I worked for, they told me that yes, they had this stubborn old lady, like a little bulldog with wire-framed glasses, holding up the whole works. They’d gotten every other inch of the property they wanted, basically a city block square, except for this one little ramshackle house. Now they were having to build around it. And if anyone tried to talk to her, she’d more likely bite their head off than give them the time of day.

The first time I looked at the architect’s drawing, I saw the tiny rectangle that was cut out where Edith’s house stood. Later, the owners of the project and I talked it over, and we decided to put some steel embeds in the side walls facing Edith’s house, big galvanized steel plates with metal studs that go back and tie into the concrete. If she wound up selling, we could tear down her house and build across by welding beams to those embeds – basically filling in the little rectangle. And if she didn’t, well, I had perfectly good plans for building around her. To me, it was a construction job, and a pretty big one at that. I didn’t really care one way or the other.

The wheels had all got set in motion about a year earlier, back in the spring of 2005. I had worked for one construction company for almost ten years. For a while, there was a ton of work. Up here in Seattle, we really reaped the benefit of the dot-com boom even more than people know. I was a project superintendent, meaning I was basically in charge of all the people and subcontractors on a big project, such as an office building. It was the kind of thing that you figured, well, this is what my life is gonna be, and I’ll retire with this company. And you feel pretty good about it.

Then the dot-coms all went down and things got strange. There was a glut of office space, so the banks started pulling the plug on any project with office space in it. There just wasn’t enough work to go around. The company I worked for finally went out of business. I went to work for another fellow, building assisted-living facilities.

I wouldn’t know until later how ironic that was. When it became my whole life’s work just to keep one old lady out of them.

The boss was a good person to work for; the firm was small, and I was given a lot of autonomy, so it was easy to get things done. I was happy just to have landed on my feet, given how tough things were. But that spring, all the guys from my old company, the one that went out of business, got involved with another firm, called Ledcor. The owner of the old company came to run Ledcor’s Seattle office, and the old operations manager came on board, and the business-development guy, and their best project manager. Then they called me to come join the party.

I loved working with that crew. They were nice guys, and they really cared about you. They had this project they wanted me to do, and – not to put too fine a point on it – they started hounding me. Hounding me in a nice way, of course. But I knew what they were doing. The first calls came from the project manager, a great guy named Roger Wagner. Roger wouldn’t tell me too much about the job – just that it involved a whole city block, and that once that was done, there were one or two other blocks, and by the way, this Ledcor was a great place to work.

See, that’s how it works: he’s sticking the bait out there and waiting to see how hard you’re sniffing. Then if you’re interested, he’ll feed you the bait and reel you in. I knew what he was doing – and he knew that I knew – so it was all very jovial. But at the same time, I was a little intrigued, because you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow so you never slam the door on anything.

The next one to call me was the operations manager. He was also giving it the soft sell, because nobody wanted to seem too eager. So we all went around it for a month or two, until they finally gave me the are-you-in-or-are-you-out call.

It was a tough decision. These guys were like family to me, but I hated leaving the job I had. I don’t like leaving things without a reason. I need to be able to say, well, this bothers me or that bugs me. But there was nothing wrong with where I was. I looked for a reason to justify the move, and all I could come up with was, well, these guys have a better retirement program or a better bonus-potential program, or they’re large enough that there is room for me to grow. But I knew that at that point I was just making excuses to do what I already knew I wanted to do.

So I said, I’m in.

The project was to build a shopping mall. A developer, the Bridge Group, had purchased most of a city block in Ballard, a nice, sleepy waterfront neighborhood just over a short bridge from downtown Seattle. But the project got stalled off just as I came on board, so they had me working on another project in the meantime. That Christmas, while I was still waiting to get started down in Ballard, a columnist for The Seattle Times apparently wrote about an odd phenomenon that went on down near the site. I didn’t read about it at the time, but I heard about it later: At night, after the bars closed, lots of people with no place else to go would park their cars on the side streets, and kind of live in them. The columnist, a guy named Danny Westneat, wrote that one night he counted forty-one live-in vehicles parked in a couple-block area – right in the neighborhood where I was going to be building the mall.

In the article he quoted Edith, saying she thought that maybe two hundred or three hundred of these itinerants camped out in this rolling car colony on the weekends. You’d think the locals would be pretty furious that the cops were letting this go on, but her attitude was “What can you do? They don’t have any money, so where can they go? The way I see it, if they don’t bother me, I don’t bother them.” Seemed like a pretty philosophical approach. I didn’t see that article until much later, but when somebody did show it to me, I was kind of surprised – you don’t expect someone with a reputation for being so ornery and crotchety to be so accepting of stuff like that.

Sometimes people aren’t who you think they are.

It was spring of 2006 when most of the permits cleared and we could finally get rolling. I got down there early that first day, to do what I always do when I start a job. I began by going around to all the neighbors on the surrounding streets, introducing myself to people, making sure they had my cell phone number in case there were any problems. I always feel like it’s good to get that up front first. You can’t pretend to do a big job like this right down the block from someone and not have them notice, or act like you’re never gonna cause them a problem. But you can let them know you care enough to hear about what you’re doing that’s annoying folks, and you’re willing to meet them halfway. I feel like it’s my responsibility. If someone was doing that to me, I’d expect the same.

The first day of breaking ground still gets to me after all these years of working construction. It’s that sense of anticipation you feel on the first day of school – excited and nervous all at the same time. Especially when you break ground in springtime. There’s something about that fresh spring air that gets in your blood, and it was getting to me as I walked the streets of Ballard that morning, although, to be honest, Edith’s block was no bed of roses. Her street still had a lot of those transients living in cars, and you could see a few of them sleeping in their dilapidated old vehicles that morning. They had a tendency to clean out the nearby Dumpsters and then toss whatever garbage they had right outside the cars, and use the weeds for their Porta-Potty, so it wasn’t the most savory atmosphere you could imagine. Pretty disgusting, actually.

But as I approached Edith’s house, I got a strong whiff of fresh-mown grass, and it took me back to when I was a kid, mowing lawns for quarters. Same thing happens to me in the fall, the smell of leaves and the snap in the air. It takes me back to when I’d go hunting with my dad. Those smells bring you back to happy times, and they kind of bring the happiness back with them. It’s a good feeling.

In the springtime I always think I’m smelling the bubble gum that came with baseball cards. I was probably imagining things, but that’s what it felt like as I approached Edith’s front gate. For just a moment, you feel like a man and a child all at the same time.

Most of the sidewalk on Edith’s block is overgrown with blackberry bushes, but they stop at her property line. Her yard is like a little clearing in that jungle. Within that clearing, Edith’s house looks like something out of a storybook. A compact building, two floors, plus a basement that peeks up out of the ground, the whole thing maybe twenty feet wide. It’s set about ten feet back from the sidewalk and the ground slopes down toward the house so the foundation is a good three feet lower than the street in front of it, making the house seem even smaller than it is. Or as if the house is crouching a few feet from the street, tired from too many years of trying to stand up straight.

There’s a tiny entranceway in front, with an arched opening. It looks like the miniature house on the front of a Swiss cuckoo clock, and you half expect a little wooden soldier to come sliding out of it every hour on the hour. There’s a small patch of grass, which Edith kept neat and tidy. It’s somewhat overgrown with dandelions now, but when I first walked past the house, it was one of the first things I noticed: how tidy the lawn was. It brightened up the neighborhood: a beautiful oasis in that ugly place, with irises planted all around it. It felt welcoming, and drew your eye away from all that urban decay. It made me feel good to see someone who, from outside appearances anyway, was happy with how she had things, especially when what she had wasn’t much. Most people complain about what they don’t have; here was someone making the most of what she did have.

Edith was tending her garden that morning. Kneeling down like that, it looked like she was praying, or looking for something she’d lost. My first reaction was one of relief. She reminded me of my great-grandma, a small, sweet, meek-looking lady, like someone in a storybook who would have a mouse for a pet. I was still a little leery, though, because I didn’t know how she was handling the news about the construction, and because of what the guys had told me about her.

“Hi, I’m Barry Martin,” I said. “I’m going to be building this project around you.” I braced for the worst.

“Well, I’m pleased to meet you,” she said, rising slowly, like she was unfolding her limbs one by one. “I’m Edith Wilson Macefield.”

A concrete truck from the Salmon Bay Concrete Plant a half-block down from her house roared past us, keeping us from talking for a moment. We sized each other up in silence, waiting for the truck to pass. Even standing up, Edith was a little stooped over, with a hunch to her back, and hazel-blue eyes that didn’t quite both look at you at the same time. She had to pick one eye to fix on you, but she made up for it by looking at you straight and hard, and not letting go of your gaze once she had it. She was a thin woman with white hair and a wide face, and looked like the kind of person who cared more about her appearance than you might expect of someone that age, especially someone seemingly so isolated. She was wearing a blue knit sweater and a pair of slacks and some garden gloves, and she pulled off one glove, walked over, and shook my hand. Even though she was small and frail, her handshake seemed strong and confident. I was relieved – the anger I’d expected from her hadn’t materialized. But I felt a little sad, too, to see this old woman, apparently living so alone.

“Well, nice to meet you, Miss Macefield,” I said. The concrete truck had passed, and the rumble of cars coming over the bridge had stopped for the moment; all of a sudden the air was still and silent, the way it gets on a warm spring day. You could hear someone mowing a lawn a few blocks away, it was that quiet.

I had introduced myself to just about everybody who would be affected by the project, but as much as I knew this was all just part of the job, this particular introduction seemed different – I mean, we were going to build a shopping mall all around this lady’s house. I couldn’t imagine what that would be like. Or actually, I could. A hell of a lot of noise and dirt and debris and destruction. I had the urge to sugarcoat it a bit, to try to make it seem less disturbing than it was likely to be; but one look at Edith and you knew: this was not a lady who took her medicine with a spoonful of sugar.

“Miss Macefield, I just want to let you know we’re going to be making a whole lot of noise and creating a big mess. There’s no way around that. But if you ever need anything, or have any problems, here’s my number. Don’t hesitate to call.”

“Well, that’s very nice of you,” she said, taking my card, holding it up close to one eye, then tucking it into a front pocket of her slacks. “I’m glad to have you here. It’ll be nice to have a little company.”

As we talked, she picked up a bag of birdseed and started spreading it on the sidewalk.

“Like to feed the birds, do you?” I asked.

“Every morning,” she replied. “I’m running late today. Had a little trouble with insomnia last night, so then I fell asleep and woke up a little late.”

“Well,” I said, “let us know if you need anything.”

“Thank you,” she said, and then, as I walked away, I heard over my shoulder: “You can call me Edith.”

I heard the rumble of the cars across the bridge nearby. I thought I got a whiff of that baseball-card bubble gum, too. I looked back and saw Edith struggle to get down to her knees, until her whole form was tucked behind the chain-link fence that faced her house, as though she had revealed just a little bit of herself, just for a moment, and now she was going back into hiding.

It’s funny how the most momentous conversations of your life – or the ones that turn out to be the most momentous – can seem, in the moment they happen, so mundane.

I stopped one more time and turned back to look at the house, standing lonely and deserted on that broken-down street. It seemed impossible, but the developers had already offered Edith $750,000. Three quarters of a million dollars, probably ten times what the house was worth – and she turned them down cold. I guess I should have known going into it that I would run into people who would give me a hard time, building a big, hulking mall around that tiny house. The other side of town – if you looked to the left of the Ballard Bridge as you crossed into town, instead of to the right toward Edith’s house – was already the site of a lot of new development, development that many people thought was killing the character of good old Ballard. And the deals had been closed to build a whole lot more. Because Edith’s was the last house standing on her block, people saw her as a symbol, a force against “yuppification,” against the overdevelopment of old neighborhoods with character and charm. I was the man bringing in change, she was the woman who wanted things to stay the same. That same Seattle Times columnist who wrote the story about the homeless people, Danny Westneat, had also written a column in February about Edith’s so-called last stand. A few days later, he wrote about how that column had “unwittingly unearthed an entire community of folks who have been captivated by her for years.” He quoted one resident as saying, “I salute her for standing up to some of the ‘progress’ that’s coming to Ballard.” Another one wrote, “I’ve come to love this lady, and I don’t even know her.”

Someone in the office showed me the article, and when I read it over, I was struck by the ending of it, what the guy wrote about Edith. He said, “How she lives and the choice she made to stay put seems to spark powerful feelings in total strangers. It did me, yet I’ve spoken to her only three times. I think it’s because she’s genuine. Authentic. She’s living the life she’s got and not asking for help, pity or money.

“What does it say about us,” Danny wrote, “that we find that so remarkable?”