I get them quite often in the mail, like probably many of you do too. Offers to buy my house.
I had thought quite seriously about it. It’s pretty big after all. Might be time to downsize.
Interestingly, one year ago today, May 18, I wrote about this old house. Then, sorting through old mail, I had found a generic birthday card for my wife. She no longer lives here. After 50 years of marriage to me, it was in this old house, in the family room, as all her children gathered round, she passed through Heaven’s gate.
Cancer took her home.
As I sit here at my writing desk even now, and every morning, looking up, through the French doors, I can see into that family room.
The family room was added in a rebuild after a fire destroyed everything we owned many, many years ago when the kids were very little.
The entire back half of the house was totally gone and all within the house consumed by fire and smoke, leaving much however of the remaining walls standing and sound.
We rebuilt.
Many years ago.
I pause for a moment in my writing, chin in hand, and look there into the family room.
Surrounding the fireplace in the family room are Dutch tiles. That was her design. She was Dutch. Loved tulips. It was there I read to her in her final days, a return to a fond activity we’d begun a half-century before.
So many memories, so much love and laughter, tears and even death in this old house.
And today, as most every day, the rest of the way, I’ll get the mail.
Then return.
To this old house.
Through this gate.
