A 9-foot sailfish arches across the wall at the home of Earle and Kathleen Durham on Wisteria Lake in Land O'Lakes. He caught the fish. She painted the artwork. The couple have created their dream home and carved a lush private oasis out of their acreage.
An artist and art teacher, Kathleen Durham is attuned to the language of the heart. The interplay of light and colors behind her home of nine years plays to that. "It's so beautiful . . . that it still takes my breath away," she says.
Visitors to Kathleen and Earle Durham's home often gasp when they see the view.
Like so much else flourishing around the home, the koi in their yard pond have grown to surprising size. "Earle pampers the heck out of things around here," said wife Kathleen Durham.
LAND O'LAKES - In the mid 1990s, Kathleen and Earle Durham stumbled across a swatch of old Pasco County land so inspiring they actually bought it in a day.
The 3.8 acres deep in what was then nothing but pasture overlooked a lake ringed with cypress trees so muscular and graceful that walking through them felt a little bit like mingling among very tall ballet dancers.
"A friend of mine told me this was for sale, and I remembered exactly where it was," recalls Durham, an artist and painting teacher who lived in Land O'Lakes off and on for decades. "Oh, what a piece of land! We just came right down and bought it."
Within a year they built their dream house on the property: a 3,300-square-foot, four-bedroom, three-bath Windjammer pool home with such a startling view of the lake that it prompts first-time visitors to gasp when walking in the front door.
"In the morning it's so beautiful in the back yard that it still takes my breath away," says Kathleen, 66, who works from a light-washed studio off the family room. "The sun is pink and gorgeous the way it filters through the cypress trees."
The view serves as inspiration for Kathleen's realistic paintings, many of which depict Florida scenes. During her classes at the nearby development, the Groves, she tells her adult students that they can learn to paint - no matter how late in life - if they feel it "here."
"Here" is the center of Kathleen's chest, her heart, a place she covers with her hand when telling an inspiring story about a student.
"I can teach them how to use brushes, how to apply paint and all the stuff that goes into it," she explains. "But they have to really, really want it. Here."
Snapshots of her students cover a wall of the studio. She also posts their paintings of lighthouses and sunsets on her Web site, "just so they can get their feet wet."
Kathleen's paintings, which she sells at the Alexandria Art Gallery, quilt the walls of the pastel-hued house, even Earle's study where her depiction of a mammoth sailfish he once caught, hangs below the mounted version of the real thing.
It's a house where everything, perhaps fueled by the fertile, subtropical landscape, seems larger than life. The bright orange and white koi fish in the pond in front were once the size of goldfish and ballooned to about eight pounds each. The Oriental grapefruit tree Earle planted in the side yard produces citrus the size of footballs. Even the leggy shadows of the slash pines seem disproportionate, like something from Jack and the Beanstalk.
The pine cones are the size of mangos.
What gives?
"Earle pampers the heck out of things around here," Kathleen says. "We've got figs, we've got tangelos, we've got Meyer's lemons."
The couple spent weeks clearing the perimeter of the lake of "vines the size of my wrist," Kathleen says of the labor-intensive job that required a pickup truck and ropes. At the time, they living in another house a few miles away in Land O'Lakes, where they had raised their children before Earle's work took them to New Jersey for 23 years.
The day Earle retired, they put their house on the market, and within a month they had sold their possessions and set out to see the country in a motor home. When the traveling grew tiresome, Pasco called them home.
It wasn't long before they found their land and set out to tame it.
"It was all cattails and swamp," recalls Earle, 70, a retired plant engineer for a can company. "You couldn't see the lake at all."
Their motive in clearing the landscape was partly to enhance the exquisite view, one that Kathleen swears she wouldn't trade "for the Gulf of Mexico."
It also had a lot to do with their six grandchildren - now ages 16 to 23. The Durhams wanted their brood to have easy access to the 19-acre Wisteria Lake, a body of water scant in alligators and ideal for water-skiing and canoeing.
Instead of downsizing, the Durhams, who will be married 50 years this spring, decided to build a house appropriate for extended family.
Although the size will help resale, Kathleen explains, she hopes they will never have to leave, that their good health will hold out and that they can eventually hire in-home care if necessary.
"Every time I come to visit, I always feel like I'm coming home," says grandson Justin Ramer, 22, who was visiting his grandparents last week while on break from Thiel College in Greenville, Pa.
One night last week, Ramer, his brother, Jeff, and a small posse of friends headed down to the dock that Earle built. Twilight burrowed into the cypress and illuminated the bromeliads Kathleen planted, also mammoth specimens. The boys climbed into a canoe with their fishing poles and headed across the lake.
The Durhams looked on happily, arms wrapped around one another.
They met at a dance in "a hick town in Pennsylvania," Kathleen recalls. Says Earle: "I said to my buddy: "I'll dance, as long as I get the blonde.' Well, we danced and I've still got her."
Their secret? "You got to hang loose, honey," Kathleen advises.
Says Earle: "And we really kind of like it here where we live. It's nice to have a place to be with our grandchildren, where we can be together and do stuff with them. We even catch a fish every once in a while."
My House is a feature profiling the people behind Pasco's housing boom. Elizabeth Bettendorf can be reached at ebettendorf@hotmail.com
