itsawonderfilledlife

An event that seems to be becoming an annual one is hubby and I celebrating his birthday watching the classic movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, on the big screen.

As we watched it last month a familiar conversation stuck in my mind:

George Bailey: OK then, I’ll throw a rock at the old Granville house.
Mary: Oh no, don’t. I love that old house.
George Bailey: No, you see you make a wish and then try to break some glass and you’ve got to be a pretty good shot nowadays too.
Mary: Oh no George don’t. It’s full of romance that old place. I’d like to live in it.

In this time and place I live, people prefer to live in new homes, over pre-owned homes (a definition to add to my vernacular). A common occurrence is for homes that are older (ie. 50 years or more) to be torn down, and replaced with brand new homes (frequently more homes on the same piece of property).

I fully and freely admit to being a romantic, and possibly even more so when it comes to houses.

As a child, I can remember the houses that I was fond of … and the stories of the lives of a lifetime of occupants that I would imagine in my mind.

There was the house down a long, straight road, lined with oak trees. It’s porch across the front of the house, with large, perfectly entered stairs. Though the original green paint was chipped and faded, though the roof looked at risk of sinking right into it’s centre, and the barn only partially standing, I loved it. I would dream of a young man, damp with the sweat of his construction labor, carrying his wife, pregnant with their third child, up those entry stairs into the house that would house their family until the day the undertaker took his aged body from the home that love built.

The house I passed on my school bus, every day, with the decorated Christmas tree in it’s enclosed porch. The turret on the second floor that always made me imagine a couple dancing in it’s candle-lit windows, every Saturday night of their childless marriage, before dimming the lights on the week. Years later, another couple, with grand imaginations bought and renovated the home, redeeming it with their love.

These and so many other homes birthed dreams of stories of lives. Though our homes are merely brick and mortar, they are also the pages on which the stories of the lives souls made of flesh and bone, are written on … the ink permanently staining each page until to the dust of Earth they return.