"It is a mistake to think of houses, old houses, as being empty. They are filled with memories, with the faded echoes of voices. Drops of tears, drops of blood, the ring of laughter, the edge of tempers that ebbed and flowed between the walls, into the walls, over the years. Wasn't it, after all, a kind of life?
And there were houses . . . that breathed. They carried in their wood and stone, their brick and mortar a kind of ego that was nearly, very nearly, human." ~ Nora Roberts
This house is up near the end of our road. Nature is reclaiming it bit by bit, the ivy seeping into every crack and cranny and clinging there tightly. Its roof shingles curl, the paint rains flakes. The windows stare with no life behind them. It is incredibly sad, but also an incredibly brave house. All abandoned houses are that - brave. I do know that it was built about the same time as our house - about 150 years ago. Imagine the history, the families, the stories. I've always wished houses could speak - surely no louder than husky whispers, but don't all things yearn to tell us their stories?
I noticed the ladder on the roof, up to the highest bedroom window in the peak of the roof. When I was 13 or 14, I was seeing a boy that had such a ladder. On the dark, moonlit evenings we would climb out of his bedroom window and down the ladder to the spot on the sagging roof that our butts just fitted nicely into. Below us we could hear his parents watching the Ed Sullivan show or perhaps playing a rather competitive game of Parcheesi. His father was an especially sore loser. "Oh now, John", we would hear his mother say, "Now watch your temper, it's just a game".
We would sit, clinging to that ladder, and he would enjoy an illicit cigarette and I would enjoy just staring at him (I was, after all, only 13 and quite prone to adoration). I look at that ladder on that abandoned house and wonder who sat there over the decades and decades. And who adored who.
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