andave's place

Out of the blue, I received word that an aunt of mine whom I had never met had decided to bequeath me an old abandoned house because she had heard I loved old things. She died last year, leaving me with some useless property on my hands that needed to be gotten rid of. My parents went down with me to her hometown and asked directions. They dropped me off at the turn-off, knowing that this would be something I'd savor. A worn down dirt path led me to the pale yellow house with the paint peeling. Vines had taken control over the house, binding broken shutters to broken windows and preventing cracks from widening. Ragged and weatherstained, moth-eaten curtains poked through the windows. The brick roof had countless holes in it, and bricks had fallen off the edges. Untended, the garden surrounding the house had grown into a profusion of grass and trees; shabby but still a Victorian garden. A stone pathway curved around the side and led to the remains of a vegetable garden, with a porch and creaky door leading indoors. I followed it and stepped inside. The damp, musty smells of times past hit me. The door had opened into a dark, dusty, and cobwebby room. Through a window a shaft of light illuminated a broken old wooden chair lying on its side on a brown tiled floor. The stove and sink in the corner showed that this was the kitchen. Moving on, a doorway led into an even darker living room. The moth-eaten curtains I had seen from outside threw a fine black grand piano surrounded by mahogany wing-backed chairs and a dusty gray horsehair couch into shadows. Following the hallway beckoning from the left wall, I came to three bedrooms; each dominated by a four-poster bed covered with a hand-made quilt, with a brown chest of drawers beside it came next. The first was the bedroom for the lord and lady of the house. The color scheme was a pleasing blue, with a finely painted horse mural on the wall. The next two rooms were both girls’ rooms, one painted a delicate rose pink and the other a lovely mint green, all rooms’ paint peeling badly. The pink room evidently belonged to the scholar; it had several bookshelves loaded with faded volumes I gingerly removed and flipped through. The green room belonged to the artistic one, if anything was to be said by the lovely sketchings covering the walls. I stopped as I reached the door, suddenly overwhelmed with the magnificence and dignity of what I had just seen. I imagined ghosts of children dressed in petticoats ran through the halls, laughing and talking. After them two stately young women bidding farewell to a gray-haired dignified couple, promising to return after they had gotten through university. Returning with someone special to meet their parents. Marrying and coming full circle with new children. My earlier thoughts of preparing the house for sale were quickly discarded. To sell the house would be to sell the dreams and hopes of the people who had lived in this house with character. People had been happy here. Perhaps generation after generation had lived in this house, birthing, marrying, dying. I only wished it was practical for me to do the same.