old house

sunrise:  6:29
Saco, Maine


Another rising in an unfamiliar place, but this time I would not find the sun. I located east, but clouds and rain are doing a thorough job today of hiding the dawn. The glow I saw to my left when I stepped out of a motel room was not the east – it was Portland, Maine.

I headed towards the ocean by car, as best I could tell, but finally gave up as the hour of sunrise approached. I pulled into a golf course/condominium complex for a rainy walk. The condos were very attractive, well groomed, and the golf course setting is park like and pretty. It reminds me a bit of where my parents moved after leaving the home in which both my mother and all of her children grew up.

J. and I were appreciating the foresight of my parents and others like them yesterday, as we sloughed through some of the final dregs of paraphernalia in my in-laws old home in New Hampshire. My mother-in-law is now living in a nice condo herself nearby, but J's dad died a few years ago.  He died in that house where the kids all grew up, where they had had a home for 40 years or so.  It has been uninhabited for some time, but far from empty. We have been spared a lot of the long slow process of clearing out since we live furthest away, and I appreciate the efforts of all the family to slowly get through it. 

The hardest part is that it still has enough of a feel of what it used to be that it has the capacity to infuse you with an aura of grief and nostalgia, if you allow it.  Old houses are filled with the evolving layers of character that grow over the course of decades, or centuries.  You feel it in every room, with many an odd book or knickknack, or piece of china, or cracked floorboard.  It can be overwhelming, but it is why I'll always love old houses.  I hope this one will find a new chapter in a new form that rekindles its beauty and glow, and gives it new stories to tell in its woodwork.