RL Ames Week 140: This Old House

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RL Ames’s Picture Choice: 2

Title: This Old House

It’s been empty for years. The walls are bare, cracked, and peeling, but they still hold within them the memories of what once was.

There’s nothing but moth eaten curtains hanging on the dirty windows now, but you can almost imagine how they used to move in the breeze of a warm summer day.

In the kitchen, there was once a great oak table. It easily held ten people, and often did. There were dinners, card games, family meetings: all held around that table. Now it’s just an empty patch of cracked and stained linoleum, the flower pattern long since outdated.

Stained and moldy carpet covers the floor of the living room now, but once it bore the tread of a worried father pacing the floor, anxious for his daughter’s safe arrival home.

Up the stairs, the third one still creaks, there’s the old bathtub. It’s chipped and stained beyond repair now, but it used to be the most magnificent gigantic swimming pool, complete with rubber ducks, tug boats, and a little diver who kicked his legs and swam all the way from one side to the other.

And the big bedroom, the one at the end of the hall, once held a majestic four poster bed. It’s gaunt and sad now, but there are hints of what once was. There are still whispers of the pillow fights and scary stories that were told under the cover and safety of giant homemade quilts.

The porch is a mass of rotting wood now, but it was once the scene of many an afternoon tea party. The overgrown weeds stretch across the once pristine lawn, but at twilight, if you squint your eyes just right, you can see the zipping and zooming of fire flies who dance, just out of reach of chubby little hands.

When the wind blows drifts of snow across the yard on a winter day, you can almost feel the cold bite of snowballs that once whipped through the air as they were released by tiny mitten-covered hands.

The old house sits, neglected and forgotten now, but it knows. It remembers the family it raised. Their lives are forever etched in it’s old bones and in the very soul of this old house.

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RL Ames spends her time chasing after her almost four year old son and sneaks in time for writing whenever she can. She can be found at rlames.weebly.com

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