This Old Farmhouse

If all these walls could talk, they’d groan with the stories of decades passed in this home. Our children have spent the better part of their short lives here; my son learned to walk on these old creaking wooden floorboards, my daughter learned to read right here inside these living room walls, my baby brought home, fresh from the hospital to this brick house. It’s been a short time, but for some of the days, it feels like a lifetime.

My forehead wrinkles began to show here under the bright fluorescent bulbs of the bathroom. I labored against the doorway, my water breaking bloody on the kitchen tiles. We have spent so many hours holding each other here in front of this fireplace, staring off and falling asleep before we can reach the bedroom. Shivering wet children, slick in their winter boots, red in the cheeks, peeling off clothes from a snow day to lay on the floor next to the heater to dry them. Dripping swimsuits and padding feet through the breezeway to run inside and grab a towel for the baby. S’mores outside on a fall Sunday and sparklers on the fourth of July, this house has seen all of our seasons laid out bare. The snow and rain and sleet, a hurricane that billowed through the forest outside, bringing down the tallest oak trees, a cold night where I can see my breath. We have weathered them all.

These fields have held and sown our seasons of growth, when we learned to stop arguing and began to start looking at one another again. A car accident that changed the course of our lives, a miscarriage sitting on the side of the old yellow tub. Mornings fresh with fog and old dairy cows at the fence, where we sip coffee and stare out the window into the fields of corn and soybeans and winter wheat. We have watched every till of the land from the dark green combine and with it, our lives are brought up from beneath the used up dirt and made fresh each summer.

Eventually we will move forward, on to somewhere new. I will mourn the loss of the home we built here, in someone else’s home. I will hold this home forever under my skin.

One day, I confided in you, I sometimes feel so uncomfortable here because I feel as if I’m never truly at home.

You said to me, “Really? I love this house.”

A secret shared aloud no longer has power over us.

There the door creaked open, to let me have this as my own, just for a short while.

I hear the baby cry and move to pick her up. We agree that she is fine and both move for the door anyway.

You see, darling, in a home with this much love, there is always enough time to show how much we need each other. There is always another planting season coming, another yield of growth. There are always ways to begin again.