The Pump House

…now in pastels…

We always made an effort to make the pump house look beautiful.

Or, I should say, my mother did, and then, later, I did.

There were the roses, climbing and not, and the cosmos and the petunias and the impatiens, and eventually, the clematis on the tall white trellis over the high east-facing window.

What is a pump house? you might ask.

A house for a pump.

Most pumps are in basements or garages or open fields, but the water pump by the Huss farmhouse where my parents lived for many years on Saline Road had its own little house.

What was inside?

Well, the pump, of course, hidden by its wooden covering, and our gardening tools and a bag or two of fish fertilizer. That was all.

Why did I want my little photo of the pump house turned into a drawing? For all the years I would come upon the photo, I always imagined an artist being able to turn it into the beautiful structure that I remembered.

So one day I called up the Ann Arbor artist Laura Strowe, who drew many buildings for the covers of The Ann Arbor Observer over many years, and asked if she could do it.

“I like to work from the actual structure,” Laura said.

“It’s gone,’ I said. “It’s been gone for thirty years or more. There’s only the photo left.

“On the property now is an old folks home, although we don’t call old folks homes ‘old folks homes’ anymore, do we?”

Laura said she would do it, and it would be a drawing done with pastels.

When I look at Laura’s lovely pastel drawing now, I hear the bees and the sound of our car tires on the gravel and the hum of the pump and the nearby traffic on Saline Road, and I smell the roses and the fish fertilizer, too.

It was the North Carolina author Thomas Wolfe (not to be confused with the Manhattan author Tom Wolfe) whose 1940 novel, You Can’t Go Home Again,” made the phrase famous — you can’t go home again — although Wolfe himself gave credit for the phrase to the writer Ella Winter.

Perhaps the title became notable because it resonates with so many of us to this day.

You can think about the past, but you can’t go back.

But you can look at your pastel drawing and smell the roses and hear the bees.