Central to my story
I’ve been think about a house from my past. I lived there, for about eighteen months. Some houses are more important than others, and this one has been shelter from the storms to a large part of my family. You see, my grandfather had it built to celebrate getting married, back in 1918. Just over a century ago; a big deal in the Canadian context. We don’t do millenial castles.
Anyhow, my father and his five other siblings were all born in an upstairs bedroom, over a period of a decade. And then, later, my grandfather came home from a morning in the woods and simply lay back and died. They “waked” him, there, in the kitchen, and laid him out in the parlour. That’s how it functioned, when I was young.
A couple of decades later, after I had finished my formal studies, I moved in to another of the four upstairs bedrooms and stayed for about eighteen months before heading off to new challenges. Actually found work, in an area where it was more typical to create your own. The house was never “warm”, (because we burned a lot of green wood), but if you huddled on top of the wood box, with your back against the hot water tank, life was good. For that time in my life, it was home. Of course, socks were mandatory.
The house, located about three kilometers from where I sit right now, has been sold to others. Distant cousins. I still think it would be [fun/nice/strategically close by] if one of my kids could regain title. After all, that farm has been personal for close to two hundred years now.
