Concerning Old Houses

Endings are never going to get easier. Funerals are never going to become natural, however natural the cycle of a life is. Like a farm lost to time on a back road, its grey-white paint stained with gallons of steady rainfall and its gutters scabbed over with acorns, we look for humanity and see that it has moved along. Unlike a barn, weathered and leaning towards sunrise, a house is not commonly associated with agriculture, the tilling of sweet earth and the bellows of life coming forth from froth-sided cows. The barn is let to return to what it served, while the chain link fence, now more morning glory vines than intertwined metal, is missing small hands pushing past its hinges.

Along walks past the sharp, sweet smell of black walnuts, you’ll find them. In wide fields, tall grass tickling the windowsills, you’ll find them. By dirt roads that seemingly never reconnect to the world you know, fenced with powerlines that can’t possibly be of use to them, you’ll find them. They come in many forms, from stone foundations to tumbledown sheds that are better defined as a general pile of planks. I like to imagine them as reminders of how fleeting we really are. I imagine the joys a pair of now unknown wedding bands had building such a place to house their families, to keep them safe. Now it stands expectantly for someone to come home. We hold innately that the ground ivy cracking apart the outer walls and the red maple sapling in the place the living room once was took the places of children roughhousing and parents sharing a kiss in the setting light of the sun. Perhaps that is why the remainders of these memories are haunting to some, this was a place where knowledge was shared and where love was, hopefully, abundant.

I wonder if the houses miss their inhabitants, if the skeletal remains of an understructure waits to be rebuilt and creak underfoot once again. But then, maybe like a parent whose child has moved away, they grow fond of the erratic black squirrels planting new white oaks and elderberry bushes in their preparation for spring. They pursue new passions; I think they like birdwatching. The fishing shack, though the tacklebox forgotten in a rainstorm sits rusted under a tarp, becomes a new home for a family of deer mice. Their sharp teeth have gnawed through the poorly cut west corner, a problem fishermen lamented on each visit. Their nest is lined with warm, dried grass and the down from itchy fur. A new home within an old one. 

Better yet, in the older leftovers of single stories held close by Virginia creepers, what if their old owners have returned following their own departure from one life? The mice, the distant calls of robins, even the bobcats, wide feet silently spreading as they round these buildings corners. The old homeowners checking to see that no one changed the wallpaper or updated their dream bathrooms.