Good morning and welcome to our therapy session. I think there are enough chairs for all of you — wait, don’t trip over the cat. Here, I’ll put him outside.

I’ve asked you all here to discuss another round of This Very Cool Old House. We do this fairly often, y’all and I, and as always, I’m interested in your opinions. Would anyone like some coffee?

In 2018 I asked Mass Save, which offers energy assessments, to come and discuss insulating this very cool old house I live in, built around the time Thomas Jefferson was stepping into the Oval Office as president. Mass Save finished its inspection and said, “With that knob-and-tube wiring, we won’t insulate anything. Call us when you get that fixed.” Despite my 96-year-old neighbor Norm’s declaration that knob-and-tube is the safest wiring for a house (Norm may be biased as his dad was the professional who electrified this house when Woodrow Wilson was president), I called some younger electricians in and they brought the wiring up to today’s code standards. As he worked, one of the electricians, an old-house history buff, called me to show me historical moments in my home’s life — the floorboard pattern indicating its size at birth and how it grew in the centuries afterward; the original fireplace found behind the wall when they ran new wires back there; strings of fascinating history that invited me in to a new connection to this house.

I got the wiring taken care of and finally ran into the Mass Save guy again last month. I invited him back over and followed him around to see what interesting things he saw.

He finished his investigation and gave me his happy and not-too-difficult results.

“The first thing we’ll do is cover your basement’s dirt floor with a sturdy, rubberized flooring as a moisture barrier and insulate the exposed beams above it,” he said. “That’ll help a lot.”

But wait! My favorite attribute about this place is its evolution and how every square inch is visibly traceable to the people who built it. The dirt floor is home to several flat stones that support trees of the early 1800s, still wearing the bark God gave ’em, still doing their duties, holding the house erect. The joists those trees support tell their own stories of the sojourn; no table saws streamlined those trees down to square — nope, they were shaped by hand. The marks in the wood show how it was done, one ax swing at a time. We have to cover all that up?

Here’s where you, the therapists, come in.

I love this house and its history. How do I cover all that up and turn it into a house that looks as if might have been built in 1973?

You far-sighted advisers out there are rolling your eyes, saying, “Yeah. You wanna keep that house? You wanna warm it up? Do what the man told you to do!”

And that’s why I invited so many of you to this therapy session. The rational “Git ’er done” half of my brain — the side that has spent its years since Eisenhower held office advising me on adventurous travel, problem solving and everything that helps you own a restaurant for 13 years — tells me the same thing. Covering all that up will keep this house in place, and warm, for another 200 years. But my emotional, historical brain shrieks, “No, I revel in its living history!”

I wonder what Ashfield’s first wheelwright W.H. Elmer, or Michael Pollen, who built the Ashfield Lake House back in the 1930s, and others who lived here would opine. Being fabricators themselves, they’d probably say, “Yup, you’ve gotta go with the innovation of the day. We did. That’s why this house has stood this long already.” I hear them. It makes sense.

But the part of my brain that appreciates the carefully hewn spindles on the stair railing and the original shakes the roofer found under the tin that friend and neighbor Willie Gray capped the house with in 1991 loves the ancient, visible glow of work that built this house, decade after decade. How the barn was converted to the kitchen and dining room as the families grew and they needed more space for the people to share.

I hear you saying, “See? Nobody else worried about preserving history, they just did what they had to do to keep it standing.” But where did the cows go? The converted barn gives rise to that living story as well.

This is your job as my therapists, ye who grew up in this historic and fascinating world of New England. I’m interested in how you blend the hand-hewn world of your handy ancestors into the new, technological one we live in today. I’m all ears, as Mr. Mass Save needs an answer.

Nan Parati lives and works in Ashfield, where she found home and community following Hurricane Katrina. She can be reached at NanParati@aol.com.

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