“Wow. It’s still standing.” I said, when I spotted that two-room pioneer-era cabin.
It sits alone in the middle of a vast high-desert valley. It’s all that can be seen from the highway that races cars full of unaware travelers past it on their ways to more exciting destinations.
The rustic home’s wood plank exterior is black with age. The windows are long gone. The chimney is a crumbling tower of stone. And it has a definite lean to the south from decades of wind. There are no out-buildings or fences anymore. Only the small home of an anonymous family survives. And each time I comment to my fellow travelers “I wonder what those walls have seen.”
The walls of a home must absorb whatever happens within them. Whether they are constructed of drywall, brick, cinder-block, adobe, wood, sheet metal, canvas, earth or ice, they silently witness the lives of their inhabitants. Or so I like to imagine anyway.
If walls could talk, wouldn’t they share the words most often repeated, as well as the ones that had the most impact in human experience? I believe so. And for me those phrases would fall all along the range of our family life. From our most mundane, to our most tragic, to our most celebratory:
The realities of our days aren’t glamorous. They are simply . . . reality.
Over the years our nuclear family make-up has included people in all sorts of combinations: aging parents, newlywed couples, cousins, overnight guests, and friends of our kids. All of them have influenced the space. Their conversations have revealed the work, worry, and wishes of their lives.
And the walls silently absorbed their words.
It may sound silly, but from the time I was little, I’ve believed that inanimate objects had feelings. So, as I have cleaned, rearranged, decorated and used our living space, I have dreamed that our home was grateful we chose to live out our lives under its roof.
And if there were just one phrase that was most consistently and indelibly impressed on its walls, I hope it would be “Hooray! You’re home.”