Generations ago, children ran up and down these stairs. A Grandmother watched them from the windows, being too refined to join in their play but not too stoic that she felt any need to stop them.
I wonder if the home I am thinking of this morning will be looked at with as much awe as I stared at stairs, at doors, at stone work - wondering and imagining the lives that so haphazardly were lived here. I know these lives were lived, as if unaffected by what happens to others as human beings would ever happen to them.
When you live life, you don't think of the days when you won't. You don't think of the stairs you will never climb again. The water fountains you will never swim in again. The floors you will never click and clack across with heels on.
The people who lived here don't anymore.
But when they did...
THEY DID.
That's what I want to happen after December 2012 has passed...when we are busy building a life combined and conjoined.
I want my home to be the place where he and I will be so intertwined with the art cabana, the blue music room, the knotted pine library, the kitchen of many meals cooked, the fire pit outside, the well-used fireplace inside - that when our great, great, great grandchildren receive it in inheritance, they will know we loved. We loved and lived here. That will be felt and remembered long after our practiced wealth will transfer into the eternal gain of living in God's rich Presence.
That will be their history...their historical society..their history museum. That will be their inheritance.
When I remember my grandparents, I don't think of the house that doesn't exist anymore on Thomas Street in Grand Rapids. I don't consider where everything used to be. It was not as beauteous as this home my friend and I toured a warm day in July. But it was home.
It is remembered. Never forgotten.
Like cemented history and blue doors...
I remember the inheritance of love.
If life is nothing else, that is the definitive purpose of breathing.
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