PROVINCETOWN — I was just out of the Peace Corps, with $1,300 to my name, a knapsack, a sleeping bag and a parrot named Divil.

The house had a big “for sale” sign. I investigated. A young man on the second floor had bought it a few months earlier on speculation. I met him and bargained with him, offering $6,500 and a year’s free rent as a second mortgage. He agreed. But now how to get the money? I was warned I would lose my money. My $1,300 would be no great loss. I borrowed $2,500 from one of the two credit unions existing then.

Thus I became the third female owner of 58-60 Bradford St., which had been called the largest house in town. It was built by Mary Picos, who was from the Azores. She was deaf, going blind and six feet tall.

The house was built by a woman, willed to a god-daughter, bought by me and eventually sold by me to another woman almost half a century later. The man I bought it from in 1969 owned it only for nine months, as long as a pregnancy. He was my tenant for 47 years, until I sold the house in 2016.

Mary Picos had arrived in the U.S. young and ambitious. She purchased land on Bradford and Winthrop streets all the way to where the fire station stands, along with property to the west of the house on Bradford Street. She sold off the lots to young families and kept 56 Bradford as a swamp garden, because it was easier to tend for someone with poor eyesight. She also had a house on Atlantic Avenue and one on Center Street.

Her income came from renting out the apartments at 58-60 Bradford and from taking in laundry for 75 cents a basket. Her grandson, Flyer Santos, collected the laundry and the fees for her. This would have been in 1924 when he was 10 years old.

Mary Picos ran the house until blindness, deafness and age moved her to will the property to her god-child, Emily Silva, who was married to Joe “Landscape” Silva. They raised four children in the first-floor apartment.

My ability to afford this massive home, which eventually had eight apartments, came through a combination of good luck and great carpenters, plumbers, electricians and friends.

I lived in the attic, which, when I got the house, was bare wood, pegged with no nails, no floors or ceiling. The roof was so peaked you could stand only in the middle. I had to walk on the floor beams. And yet I said, “I can live here.”

I found myself facing four cesspools, an ancient furnace, no hot water heater and multiple strangers as tenants.

Frank Schaeffer, of the White Horse Inn, visited me and explained leases. It was a good lesson, but I never used a lease. When a couple from Quebec, who were tenants for years, needed a lease to cross the border, they made up their own and I signed it. Schaeffer’s most important contribution to me was introducing me to the builder Adam Wolf, a quiet man with kind ways and a strong character.

I showed Adam the attic space, which had two brick chimneys jutting through the roof. Adam was undaunted. He started that spring and I was living in the attic by the fall. I could watch the progress from the kindergarten classroom at Provincetown Veteran’s Elementary School, where I taught for two years. Each week I asked Adam for the bills and he would reply, “I don’t have all the materials added up yet.”

He didn’t charge me until the summer rents came in and it was only later that I realized he was protecting me. Adam is a long-time member of the volunteer fire department and he and his wife, Eve, are a devoted couple. He is Adam and she is Eve.

He built the three flights of outdoor stairs to my attic apartment. They are still standing 50 years later. They kept me in shape like a membership to the gym. I don’t have to shovel them anymore. Thank you, Adam, for building my home and caring for 58-60 Bradford St. for decades.

Thank you to Jimmy Roderick, Bobby Perry and Ray Roderick for tending the cesspools. I put out a six-pack of Guinness for them after each pumping.

Thank you, Gary Silva, for installing recessed lighting in my aerie, to John Lisbon for the addition of a dormer to my attic apartment, and thanks to Bobby Meads for the plumbing.

Since I was short on money, I had to wait for many finishing touches. I lived for months with an electric extension cord running to the boiler room for power, and I had no kitchen sink. The dishes got washed in my antique bathtub, which I had found in the woods, and in my old-fashioned bathroom sink. It was 33 inches long with a splashboard, so sensible. I bought it from Paul Koch for $2. He kept the flowers that he had planted in it.

My black iron stove came from Wendy Hackett Everett’s house. It cost me $40. Two bouncers from the Old Colony Tap carried it up the three flights of stairs. I didn’t know until the third winter that the kerosene fuel, which came upstairs in five-gallon glass jugs, could have exploded when moved from the cold outside to the heat of the stove. I wonder how many guardian angels I have.

Norman Tierney, who installed a new furnace in the house in January 1971, surprised me by hooking up the apartment to the furnace as well. The iron stove became an art object. Thank you, Norman.

And thank you, Frank Hurst, who was my plumber for decades, always with a joke and a smile. I had to call him once for a frozen pipe at 2:30 a.m. and he was there in 10 minutes. All of the workmen had a code: they always took care of “a woman alone.” A tribe of Sir Galahads they are.

The tenants that came through that house reflected every decade of Provincetown’s human history.

The hippies of the 1970s brought drugs, and you had to be careful in selecting renters. When they came to the door, I would “X-ray” them, watching their speech, posture and attitude. On two occasions a visitor crashing in an apartment had a situation with drugs. The drop-in center responded quickly. Depression was also an issue. Once I asked for a tenant’s parents’ phone number and waited with that tenant until his parents arrived and took him home.

In the late 1970s and 1980s several single mothers rented my apartments. They were smart, attractive college girls put out of their homes because of pregnancy. They were so brave; I thought I would not charge them for the electricity. But then I decided I would collect the electric bills and give the mothers the money for parties for their babies. Eventually all those mothers returned to college. Some got master’s degrees, two got doctorates. All of the children but one went to college.

The next decade brought the AIDS crisis and Provincetown was the first place in the country that cared for these stricken people.

By the end of the 1980s and 1990s, Provincetown went indoors, promiscuity lessened, gyms opened and energy was focused on fitness.

So many students have returned to say hello and tell of their success and families. And who is the star of that group? K.C. Myers, your editor (a tenant in the summer of 1988).

For years I’ve been a member of Servas, a program of worldwide travel where people invite travelers into their homes for a few nights, no money passed. I was able to host these travelers in unoccupied units.

I would say the house — which Jackson Lambert called “Kelly’s Corner” and that then became the title of my newspaper column for 30-plus years — gave me more freedom than responsibility.