This Old House

Hello. Happy Monday. I hope it is happy where ever you are.

I wanted to share one more thing about my grandmother's house. It is a poem I wrote, almost 14 years ago - when I was in high school. The assignment was to write a poem that takes you through a passage of time. So mine was looking at the house through my eyes as a child, into becoming an adult.

This old house means hours of agonizing car rides and destinations filled with Grandma, aunts, uncles, cousins and newly found relatives.
This old house is full of family.

This old house is the home of loving hands that wake early on Sunday morn and begin to prepare.
Days of rest mean cooking at eight a.m. in order to fill long tables that extend out of the enormous dining room.
Tables which elongate all the way to the small square in the kitchen reserved just for us by the warm window.

This old house has never-ending staircases which extend up and up.
Look upward into all of the twists and turns which take us right into the heavens.
Count as we go up all the twirling, swirling steeples of steps.
Climb right to the top, right into the attic filled with rooms inside of rooms.
Rooms full of forgotten toys and haunting mysteries.
Watch as the history of another unfolds right before our eyes.

This old house is full of secret doors and passages into other worlds.
Doors, doors and more doors leading into warm welcoming places, as well as cold forbidden places.

Travel into the sunshine that leads to the comfort of being a child and tip toe through the darkness of what is yet to come.

This old house is just another place to travel to.
Car rides are no longer painful.
Car rides are no longer even remembered.

This old house is now the home of one pair of hands.
Days of rest are now spent cooking for a small table which does not meet the enchantment of the kitchen window.
The small square reserved for us is no more.

This old house has steps upon steps.
Steps that simply create longer distances to travel in order to reach upstairs.
Twirling and swirling as we exceed only justifies the height we must fall in order to come back down.

This old house has a cluttered, dusty attic.
What an impossible task to clean the rooms and rooms of everyone else’s “has beens” and “what if” projects.
Watch as we tumble over the toys which have been lurking for centuries.

This old house has doors in the most unusual places.
Doors, doors and more doors, which only lead into stuffy, little rooms filled with cold shadows.

Travel through the darkness of what is now to return to the sunshine of what has been.


This was where our square in the kitchen was....