Sometimes late at night or early in the morning when the people I love lie sleeping upstairs or are off someplace doing their own thing, I sit with my dog, and listen to the echoes of our house. I’ve lived here for almost forty years, cleaned, paid taxes, pottered in the garden, and renovated from time to time.
Like the fields where I chased butterflies in my childhood, the mountain my husband loved to climb as a boy, or the beach where our children fished in tide pools, this house doesn’t belong to me nearly as much as I belong to it. Does a house have eyes and ears? If I ask, will it divulge its secrets? That depends on the way I ask and how much I’m willing to hear. I choose a comfortable spot. The kitchen tends to be distracting because there is always something waiting to be done, but the landing on the stairs is less cluttered and large enough to hold me and my dog. We sit there for half an hour or so; me in my pajamas, the black, Belgian Shepherd warming my feet as we bundle up together under a rug because the heat hasn’t come on yet, and I replay tapes from the past in my head. I return to the time when my children were all home for vacation and the house, like my heart, was filled with family.
In the stillness on the stairs, it is as if I can hear them all once more; the children singing, their voices calling out, my first-born listening to music, my eldest daughter and her husband; my youngest and her family. I can hear the clatter of their dishes; of glasses being raised and clinked; the thud of foot-steps in the bedrooms above me; showers running, toilets flushing, phones ringing, doors banging, voices rising and falling like wind through the trees, as well as laughter; so much laughter filling the rooms and overflowing into a thousand empty spaces.
This house holds countless other memories from other times, other places in our lives, good, bad, sad and happy, times of want and of plenty. It’s a memory bank that my husband and I invested in, beginning in the days when our family was young, hoping for a good return someday when we grow old. The things we say or do happen once in the present, but are repeated countless times in our memories.
Sitting on the stairs with my dog on my feet, I feel very rich, having learned to find the positive things in my life, and in spite of tragedy, many good things have occurred.
