It’s quiet here.
Nothing to disturb the floorboards except me, and I'm standing still, small in the space around me. No one’s hand on a sash lock, the clunking easing-up of an old window whose edges catch on leftover paint and settling. The creak of a closet door opened surreptitiously before sunrise I can call to mind, but here the doors stay closed.
If I listen very carefully I can hear the air move through the four floors of this great, empty space, but only just; it slips along the corners into hallways and along thresholds and up the walls, the faint and fleeting echo of an outside breeze that eased its way in under a door whose weatherstripping never entirely served.
But mostly the air simply is, patiently. It sits—the whole house sits—one deep, abiding breath that’s not held quite but exists as though it were frozen just so. And here I am, interloper in this static dream of possibility that both heralds and hides from my role as plausible steward.
Am I the one to usher in the next iteration of a life? To wave over couches here and stools there, and to be responsible for the tiny drop of errant blue paint that a little one will pick at years from now while squatting down to consider so many strewn toys?
The house can’t be sure, and it considers me silently. I forget to breathe myself, and remember, and let myself become a part of it. I travel up wood members, I follow the ghosts of knob and tube and emerge in the attic to take in the view from its single insistent window. When I dive back into the depths, my shadow splashes into the efflorescence adorning the concrete perimeter, the latter some former attendant’s well-considered contribution to a century-old legacy, that it might endure a century more.
I breathe again and I'm in the original crown moulding and the slick marble of an upgraded kitchen and the little crack in the stucco that was always noticed but never cured, because why should it be? The hallmarks of years and years of standing tall and proud and growing tired but never bowed.
I too bear cracks from letting in the decades of lives, some of which are mine, some which never belonged to me but which visited for a time. I wonder which little fractures I will fix, I wonder if someone will breathe me in and consider the great stillness that grounds me underneath the endless shifting of experiences layered above in what I have built.
I’m not the next one, I tell the house, I’m just here to check on you. Something is coming, yes, something months from now in what form I cannot entirely predict though I have some notion, and I’m just here to acknowledge you and to listen and to prepare you, that we might both pause for a moment before the inevitable changing of hands and the next ten thousand turns of a key by those who will write your next chapter.
Be well, I say, for that is all I can; I am humbled before your age and grace and I too am ready for the next. Together then, and indeed there will be time.
