The Renfield House

We did some digging and think we have a pretty good idea who was here at Mezzacello from the start. The Auditor’s Office in our city (Columbus Ohio) burned to the ground in 1920, so therefore there are no records before 1920 in Columbus. We learned to call this The Renfield House.

Interesting First Resident

The man who built the house died while it was under construction. He died of an apparent heart attack in 1868 in Baltimore, MD and his coffin was shipped in a large oak box back from Baltimore on the newly completed Baltimore-Ohio railroad. The coffin was transported on the train in a large shipping box, AKA a sarcophagus. 

When the coffin shipping box arrived it was far too big to bring into the nearly complete house. The architect and builder came up with an clever plan to get the body, coffin and shipping box into the house. repurpose the crane used to build the roof and lift the box through the unfinished roof.

And that is where that box has remained for 160 years. Rick calls it the Renfield Box because he fancies Dracula in the coffin. He likes to think about poor Renfield languishing up in the attic just waiting for his master to rise from the box.

The Shipping Manifest and The Funeral Business in 1868 Ohio

Why you might ask was it brought to the house? In 1868 there weren’t a lot of funeral homes. Bodies were displayed in the house (the showing) and then taken to the cemetery after the viewing for burial.

But only the coffin was taken to be buried, they left the coffin shipping box up there. It’s a rather large box; 85 cm x 2.5 m x 95 cm  and to this day it is still in the attic. And most surprising of all was that a faded yellow copy of the shipping manifest remains glued onto the box lid.

It is so sturdy and heavy! I believe that box will be there long after we are gone as well. People will refer to the house as The Renfield House instead of Mezzacello for a long time, I think.

Those little windows amongst the corbel brackets are where the train casket shipping box (AKA sarcophagus) still resides. Minus its’ coffin and corpse of course. But who knows what was left behind?

About How We Discovered This

When we first looked at the house on the auditor’s website its age was listed as “old”. To determine the history of our humble home we had to use a variety of resources; Census records, tax records, and newspapers. All of these were available at the Main Branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library.

Our research revealed that we had:

• A lawyer and his teenage bride
• A minister
• A father and son doctors who used the house as home and office
• An engineer
• A travel agent
• A widow lived here for 40 years
• The house was a boarding house at one point
• Twice the house has stood abandoned
• Later it was divided into apartments
• Jim’s father knew the last owner before us. Marvin (the previous owner) worked with Jim’s dad in Big Lots management.

The library staff were super helpful and the research and records department is really slick. It took a lot of sleuthing but it was worth it. We also had the resource of neighbors whose families have lived in this neighborhood for generations — some even in the house!

The Gift of the Magi

Rick and I are both fans of O. Henry’s short story “The Gift of the Magi”. It’s a great parable and it reminds us that to be successful, you have to communicate, trust, and compromise. Yesterday was a Gift of the Magi day at Mezzacello.

We do trust each other to bring out the best of the other — and that is exactly the point of The Gift of the Magi.

Jim Bruner

What Vehicle Are You Taking Today?

We are lucky to have two vehicles at Mezzacello. We have a truck my brother sold for the farm. We also have a nicer car for social events, comfortable travel, and a place where I can down and digest food when we are out.

Most mornings, I take the BMW and Rick takes the truck to work. i use the truck when I need heavy duty transport. Or when I am hauling dirt and plants.

Yesterday, Rick asked me what vehicle I was going to take. I asked for the truck – yes, it was me! I had to take some hose and a sprinkler and a machine that bleaches plastic with H2O2 and UV light and some fertilizer to work. You know, average stuff.

The Wrong Tool

Rick took the car. Well, when I came home from work in this big truck, this is what I see. My Car COMPLETELY full of plants without pots and dirt EVERYWHERE!

This blog post isn’t being written because I am mad. It is because we both of us love our particular passions at Mezzacello so much that we forget to take time to use the right tool. I can clean out the car (actually it’s not that bad) but the truck would have been 100% easier and more convenient.

Passionate Choices In The Moment

Rick took the time to remind me of all the times I needed 12′ of U Channel to build out my bioreactor and I only had the car. He’s not wrong. The issue is still about communication.

Also I love how these photos tell the “Green Acres” mythology of Mezzacello. Rick is all about beauty, grace, and gardens of the soul, and I am all about science, animals, permaculture, tech, agriculture, and infrastructure. We are not at odds at all.

We compliment each other so well. We are impulsive, headstrong and passionate. We do trust each other to bring out the best of the other — and that is exactly the point of The Gift of the Magi.

Y’all remember the Smurfs? When I was in middle school every Saturday morning I would watch “The Smurfs”. I loved the message of community and resourcefulness. The singular villain, Gargamel, was a stand in for the cruel world and later on I would learn was me as well. I was enchanted by their village that they created from found materials. LOL! There was one thing about the Smurfs that I did not connect with and it is coming back to haunt me in my adult professional life, ironically enough. Why were Smurfs so one dimensional?

I mean really! All of the Smurfs were one dimensional (except for Papa Smurf, the mysterious wise daddy with all the answers). They were all one note characters that were useless without the specific skill they brought and useless without the care, recognition, and aid of the others. I always saw that as a weakness; even as a child. Today as I navigate the world as a 21st Century Mentor, Data Scientist, Hobby Anthropologist, Inventor, Poet, Activist, Educator and Farmer I find that the world is really far more like the Smurfs than I had ever imagined. Everyone wants to be a specialist and being a Thomas Jefferson, DaVinci, Hedy Lamar, or Buckminster Fuller is anomalous. Those people are my heroes. We all need to be more like them or at least Papa Smurf. We sure as hell need more Smurfettes in STEM. It boggles my mind that people think they have to be one thing really, really well, or one thing just good enough. I knew even as a kid that I would need a “Ride or Die” team of Smurfs to effectively exist in the real world.

My dream team was always Brainy, Brauny, Farmer, Handy, Happy, Poet, Smurfette, and Papa Smurf. That’s who I am today (Smurfette in spirit) and it boggles my mind that people are frustrated — especially on LinkedIN — that I take credit for being all of those things. It seems without fail every time I post on LinkedIn about my “other” interests I get confused comments or messages along the lines of “what is it you do again?” I chose the job title “Sultan of Systems” ON PURPOSE. I know the entire universe – empirical, quantum or relativistic or hell, even a holographic data projection – is a system. I knew even then that it was really a sustainable ecosystem. To act instinctively with coherent laser focus is to take without giving and renders you useless in a world that deals in analog and incoherent light and a web of life.

One should be as useful and engaged as your mind, body and community will allow. I happen to believe that every interest is an opportunity to change the world. And I act on that impulse. Don’t be a Smurf; Be a dimensional, interested and interesting person. Surround yourself with challenges, vibrant community, and fabulous colleagues and friends. Feel love and give it freely. Accept your inner Gargamel and be patient with it and the world at large. I am enough. I am a Smurf Village. I hope you all are too. Cheers!

Parterre Gardens, Guerrilla Gardens

In the ongoing mythology of Mezzacello the idea of a DMZ between “North and South Korea” i.e. the pretty and plentiful gardens has been a sacred one. We both of us decided we needed a neutral ground to rest and ambulate. In June 2019 we “decided” we needed parterre gardens, guerrilla gardens.

Farewell, DMZ

Well South Korea (Rick) decided he was going to make a land grab. He claimed the DMZ behind the pond and around the pergola as his parterre knot garden. I went away for a weekend and came home to find that Rick had bought 64 1-gallon boxwood plants to populate the parterre garden.

At first I was mad. We have a policy that anything over $200 we both have to agree to. But Rick really snagged a deal on these plants; $10 a boxwood plant (they retail around $24-$30 a pot).

But that is only half the battle. There need to be 64 holes that need to dug. I bought an auger and we’ll (he’ll) just have to pound away at that.

This is a guerrilla move, but at least he concedes that we should plant a medicinal and culinary herb gardens in the five knot triangles. The issue is that boxwood parterres require really acidic soil. But most herbs require slightly alkaline soil.

I will have to keep doing research to come up with a system that will allow both ecosystems to thrive. No big deal; Mezzacello is all about applied STEM and research.

Emerging Ecosystems

I am beginning to realize that this parterre is actually an emerging sixth ecosystem. It is a hybrid of Rick’s formal vision and my food first mission. It is comprised of largely perennials and some annuals.

It has to be watered regularly (hating that). But I will develop a system around that eventually. The last obstacle is predators.

Those tasty delicate herbs attract all the wild rabbits and ground hogs to the yard. I stepped in an animal dropping for the first time (outside of my livestock yard) and I was not happy.

I have to say, after visiting the Cloisters of Metropolitan Museum of Art and seeing how herb gardens were planted, Rick was right on point. It has been nice to walk right out the side door and take cuttings of the herbs when cooking.

I will keep monitoring this situation.

The Neighbors Truck

Mezzacello is an enclosed sustainable urban ecosystem, but it is also part of a larger ecosystem of community that is our awesome neighbors. Community is like a garden, I didn’t know this but I quickly discovered it to be true. This is the story of the neighbors truck.

Rick and I have owned houses before. We had never been so invested in transforming a property like we have transformed Mezzacello. What we didn’t know when we started on this journey was how valuable a truck would be.

It is no exaggeration to say Mezzacello exists because of Randy and his generosity.

Jim Bruner

We NEEDED a Truck

It was always a “nice to have” item. We soon learned it was a “must have” item but there was no budget in the beginning. Enter Randy and his Ford Ranger truck.

We started installing the first potager garden beds and it quickly became apparent that one ton of horse manure wasn’t going to fit in my car. That’s when Randy offered us the use of his truck.

It is no exaggeration to say Mezzacello exists because of Randy and his generosity. He saw our vision early on and he was willing to help. With the use of Randy’s truck, our vision blossomed.

Blocks, pergolas, bags of mulch, soil, grass feed, and many lawnmowers and chainsaws were bought and delivered in the bed of our neighbors truck.

We Finally Bought Truck

After two years, I finally bought a used Ford Ranger and then a Ford F-150 from my brother. But I never had a car payment, thanks to Randy. I put that money towards Mezzacello.

Reframe the idea of a garden as any system to you tend to and bring forth life. Randy definitely qualifies as a pollinator in my garden of people. He and his remarkable generosity are part of the origin story of Mezzacello, and a reminder that good people exist, and you should try to be more like Randy – and his truck.

What you are looking at is the foundation stones from a house that used to sit on this lot. Every garden bed we build we know we are going to excavate some foundation. Luckily at this point we have a pretty good idea of exactly what the footprint of those houses was. But it doesn’t make the job any easier.

At this point I have pulled 200 stones up out of the ground. At least half of those are now being used to shore up the interior foundations of the house. While the house was Abandonned some of the interior cellar walls collapsed. I have rebuilt those walls with “garden rocks”. Everything has a purpose and a use at Mezzacello. Everything.

When the houses that used to sit on the plots that comprise the grounds at Mezzacello were abandoned, condemned, and eventually razed, they only tore down the houses. They left the foundations intact and just below grade. One house burned down (you can still see the ash and char in the soil) the other house was dismantled for removal to another site, but that plan was abandoned when it became obvious that the house was riddled with termites. To add insult to injury they filled the now exposed cellars with rubble. Ostensibly this was to save on the costs of hauling it offsite.

This might at first blush appear as an annoyance, but we don’t think of it that way. I mean it is initially, especially when there is a stone in a place where we KNOW there was no foundation and this particular stone is actually an 18” x 36” limestone step that was probably the side door stoop at one point. But that’s where our imagination and sense of honor kicks in. These stones were people’s homes. Lives were created, lived, loved, and lost in and above those brackets of stone rubble foundation. It is the living heritage of living and building Mezzacello where we are building it.

One day, Mezzacello will no longer be here. But the energy we created, embodied, and expended will have mattered. Those stones matter. We all of us matter. When we honor that, we are living our best life. Now pardon me while I continue to prise this big *ss stone out of the parterre garden bed. I know I can use it somewhere.

Of course it wouldn’t be a true Mezzacello story if Rick didn’t claim that every stone, pipe, clay sewer line, and random artifact is the evidence of a long buried Roman ruin. He does this just to mess with me – but secretly I play along.

Today was the first day of spring that I have to do planting maintenance at Mezzacello. One of my primary tasks was making sure both the animal, aquatic, and botanical species that we grow here have appropriate levels of the essential elements to thrive and grow.

The animals are pretty well cared for at this point. Chicks and ducklings are thriving. The fish are spawning and the worms and crickets are out of the basement. My attention turns to the biochemistry of the fauna end of the Mezzacello ecosystems; namely the potager gardens and the formal gardens. More on the potager gardens later. Today I am spreading potash, potassium, and calcium amongst the formal gardens. Literally ash, potassium and chicken and duck shells and oyster shells on the ground for next years growth.

While Rick is planting bulbs, I am following behind him with a mixture of crushed eggshells and oyster shells at the base of peonies, gladiolus, and tulips. (Also some for the chickens and ducks for stronger shells). I just finished spreading a gallon of raw calcium on top of all the mulch above the bulbs that need calcium. As I was going into the house to prepare 2 Cap Cod Cocktails for Rick and I, I saw this egg that Richard had absent mindedly set in the impromptu herb beds on the side door stoop. It made me laugh.

I rushed out of the house at 6:50 this morning to serve as a judge captain at the Ohio Academy of Science’s State Science Fair #OhioSSD19 and asked Rick to feed the rabbits, fish, worms, ducks, and chickens. Apparently he had a handful of duck eggs and set one down in the herb bed next to the leeks we were growing from leek bases we’d nurtured in a cup of water in March and was now planted in this box. It made me laugh. Technically it is a source of calcium but it needs a bit more processing before Mother Nature can use it, dude. LOL! Never a dull moment.