Lovely Old Soul
This is Our House
Not lovely by appearance, sadly, but lovely by soul. She’s been through absolutely everything and still warmly whispers to us, I am your home, you are safe with me.
Prologue
This is our house. It has endured 145 years of Michigan storms and weather and the wicked waste of this old town. Yet it remains strong and lovely.
Not lovely by appearance, sadly, but lovely by soul. She’s been through absolutely everything and still warmly whispers to us, I am your home, you are safe with me.
This house was built in 1880, like most of the others here, but ours was condemned and expected to be torn down. There were several other lovely old souls that lined this street and they demolished them… every single one, all the way down to the train tracks. They’re barely ghosts anymore except to us who care they once were there. And by “us”, I guess I mean me. The coldness and indifference of the townsfolk is unsettling. I don’t mean to imply they’re unkind, they are outwardly friendly but in a very disconnected, short-lived way…like an energy field between them and me. They’re different in some way. They’re like human embodiment’s of these houses, beyond a century years old. They just remain where they are and carry on. Many of them as dilapidated as the houses. They hobble along with their canes and portable oxygen tanks like they have no idea there is someplace else or someway else.
It could, however, be me who emits the force field between us. I’d be terrified to settle in to life here as it appears to me. I can’t let what I see here be my fate or the fate of my mother or my sister as it was the fate of my father, the strongest spirit I’ve ever known. For a person like him to unwittingly succumb to this insidious killer makes me absolutely certain it was his ultimate acceptance of this place that killed him. The decay and poverty, the contamination of the ground, the air, and the water. He let this town in. Acceptance is sometimes an evil trick.
My parents, who were each raised in hard worlds with little to no luxury of any kind, saw beauty in this crumbling old house and shared a vision of what they believed they could do with their own hard work. They bought the house, barn, and property for $4000!
My mother, one of 14 kids raised poor, a sweet and naïve country girl, even still, and my father a rough soul from south Chicago who had to fight and be fierce in the world… to them, this house and property represented success. It’s a significant piece of land and they own it. It belongs to them. They don’t see the peeling lead paint and crumbling mossy porch; they don’t see battered broken old trees. They don’t care about lead paint, asbestos, radon, mold, and arsenic wallpaper. Those are all the shards of glass that cut into my mind. My thing to bear. I love this house for what it meant to them. What it represented to them in their lives. That’s what it has become … that’s the life they breathed back into her. Her soul is their soul.
To be continued…
