Getting to Milton

You can drive through Milton on your way to the beaches, or you can just as easily drive around it. Or you can go a different way entirely, through Bridgeville and Georgetown, for instance, and never even know Milton exists. In flat southern Delaware, the town rises gently on both sides of the Broadkill River. Fishermen sit in rowboats on the pond, as still as zen monks. Old wooden houses silently line the main street as it curves down to the bridge and then back up again on the other side. Narrow lanes loosely stitch together the half dozen streets. In a hidden square, delapidated houses gaze on an old Methodist graveyard. Just beyond the town lie ruined buildings, fields, farms, dark woods and swamps, creeks, tangles, and the river, all suffused with a pale luminous light, a silvery wash that emanates from an overturned bowl of sky. The landscape of the nearby beaches was sunny, cheerful, bright, and in retrospect, superficial. The landscape around Milton was Corot.

But when we drove through the town it seemed empty. Houses were dark, windows curtained. Only a few businesses were open downtown. We thought we could afford a house to restore in Milton, but we wondered what there could possibly be to do in such an obscure place.

We wanted to take the leap, though. We'll find a small house, we assured each other. Nothing too complicated. It will be a good investment, we told each other. A prudent move. It's just for a couple of years, we promised our friends in Rehoboth Beach. We'll move in, fix it up, sell it. Don't worry. We'll be back.

But it didn't work out like that.

For one thing, the house we found wasn't small. It's a grande dame, Greg told me. He had already knocked on the door and gotten a tour from the owner, the same day that I (still in DC) had discovered it on the internet.

It was, the advertisement told us, a Greek Revival, built circa 1830 by a sea captain, and on the National Register of Historic Places. The advertisement didn't mention that its last paint job -- a mustard yellow -- was curling off the clapboards. The once imposing two story porch sagged dangerously over the sidewalk. Victorian era gingerbread trim was broken and gaping. Vines hid unpruned azaleas and hollies. A volunteer crape myrtle poked out of the yews under the library window. Beneath a giant magnolia, a cracked concrete pond was filled with debris.

Inside, the house was dark and gloomy, and permeated with the sour smell of old fireplace ashes. Shredded silk drapes hid every window. Brittle dark wallpaper was glued to walls and ceilings. Bare wooden floors were dull with grime and the library floor was covered with lime green shag carpeting. Cobwebs drifted in corners. The kitchen was a period piece, built according to a 1949 USDA design, and covered in knotty pine. The seventies vinyl flooring matched the harvest gold appliances.

The man who was selling the house had bought it a few years earlier from its long-time owner when she moved into a nursing home. She and her husband, the owner of the local cannery, had bought it and restored it in 1949. Before that, the same family had owned it for 101 years. It had been one of the most impressive houses in town. But nobody had taken care of it for a long time.

Still, the lawn swept down stone steps lined with mock orange all the way to the river, and though most of that riverbank belonged to the State of Delaware, ten or fifteen feet of it would belong to us. Back inside, I breathed the smell of ashes: a haunting smell.