20140105.0818

A blanket of snow shrouds Sherwood Cottage and the houses and streets surrounding it, setting into stark relief against its stunning background the few blades of grass that poke up from it and the walls of houses protected by their eaves.  There is a peaceful quiet greater than that typical of mornings in this place; the snow serves to silence much, both in itself and in it prompting the dwellers of the wind-swept plains to remain in their own homes, where their sounds do not reach my ears.  And I relish it.

In the outer silence, I am able to reach out within my home with all of my senses; I can sit and simply feel the house.  I hear the susurration of the space heater in the bedroom where my wife still sleeps, the high electric whisper of current being forced through gas in my desk lamp and the magnetic oscillations my computer and its screen produce.  I know that each cat does his own piece, with one even now padding softly towards the bedroom and another contemplating mischief; the third is on the floor where the heater discharges, waiting for the warmth to return.

I feel more than hear the house breathing.  My wife and I have done much to insulate the old windows, but air still moves even if the wall furnace is not blowing.  The doors, I think, which must remain passable--I have to be able to get out with a shovel somehow--are its bronchia, its spiracles.  There is the sense that this place, though an older house and abused by its former tenants, is yet alive, still struggling on more through resignation to continuance than through defiance or in response to love.  (And I think again of Bedfordside Garden, in which my wife and I were the first tenants, and which flourished because of love.)

And this place has been abused; the marks of it are more plain than bruises, for bruises fade with the body's ability to heal, and a house cannot make itself whole again.  Its wounds have been patched in part, and its blemishes covered over, but they still remain.  I can see that college students who did not know how to hold a house have lived here; I can see it in the results of inattention to fixtures and the one strange stain in the carpet that remains, and in the dorm-room-drab paint that is on the walls that are painted (over many layers of other colors that show where the paint has peeled away).  I can see it, too, in the burns and bullet holes on the accompanying garage, and I wonder what else I will find.

Sherwood Cottage has been good to me and mine, and I thank the house for it.  It has served as a refuge from the frenetic furor of The City, permitting space in which to heal myself from what I did to myself therein, and I appreciate it.  It will serve as the first home for my beloved child yet to come, and I cannot help but be grateful.  But it is a place I know I will not be in long, and so although I do extend myself outward to feel what is here, to find the limits of this space amid the snowy world surrounding it, I will not extend deeply into it.  I respect it and I maintain it, and I work in my small and inexpert way to improve it, but this is not my forever home; my time here is limited, and so I am not settling here.

For now, though, I know its limits, I know mine, and I will work within them in the snow-made quiet.