Imprints and Footprints

Our neighbors came over for supper last week, and Peg brought pictures of what our house looked like in the 1980s when they lived here. The barn, chicken house and other outbuildings are gone now, and the last owner added on two rooms to the east side of the house and a closed porch to the west so the place looks very different, and, yet, still the same.

Groves of trees still border us on the west and east, and you can still see the old cement steps under a new back porch. In one picture, the flowers planted by the house looked nearly identical to what I put in this year in the very same beds. Peg and Ron's son, Troy, took his little boy up to see his old room and recreated the warning signal of "Mom had had enough" by shutting the basement door hard. "When you heard that," he said, "you knew she'd hidden the yardstick."

Part of the old kitchen is still here -- used as a laundry room now -- the linoleum and cupboards are the same. What was the dining room we now use as a reading room or kitchen annex -- we haven't settled on what to call it. And what is our living room they kept shut off from the rest of the house because it was too cold to heat.

It must have been weird for them to sit in a house that was theirs and is now ours, with our aesthetic and way of life. We have lots of books and quilts and no toys (not counting cat toys which Teddy doesn't play with anyway). Aside from the occasional bursting into song, Dave and I are relatively quiet so it must have sounded very different around here too. They had boys in and out of the house and snowmobiles and bicycles and dogs.

I'm grateful for their stories because we have a better understanding of our place. Now we know that the pumpkins grew like gangbusters because the garden is right where the cow lot used to be, and the pipe Dave ran over with the lawn mower was once actually connected to a building and not mysteriously out in the middle of nowhere.

Their stories give me a better sense of history as we move forward and put our imprint on the place. And a deeper responsiblity as well.