Living In Someone Else’s House

Unless you designed and built your house, you live in someone else’s house. Someone else lived there before you and someone else will live there after you’ve moved on.

You might change the lightening fixtures or change the color of the walls. You might change the shutters and curtains and put down new carpets. You might put up different shower curtains, add new appliances, or even do some landscaping.

The kitchen counters can be upgraded and the bathroom remodeled. The bedrooms might move some furniture or place a television on a wall. Nik-naks can be scattered about with pillows to give a building a lived in feeling and a personality.

Then you change jobs or get evicted and move out. The sofa and chairs and tables and nik-naks can go with you but not the toilet or kitchen cabinets or countertops.

Walls and lighting show age of the house. Cracks can be patched and antique electrical and plumbing and HVAC can be replaced as the demands of the house changes.

It seems in the gentrification of this village, the solution is to demolish the old and rebuild from scratch. So go all the memories to the trash pile.

Passing by old barns and building on the side of the road that have been abandoned and are dilapidated fascinate our imagination of the people who once lived there. The babies who were born upstairs, the stories told on the porch on a hot summer day, the gatherings of family after worship service with a warm kitchen and smell of communal cooking.

 According to legal documents from Christian, House, Benedetti and Lubman, a notarized statement Blanche S. Byrdsong, widow was hereinafter designated Grantor and I was hereinafter designated Grantee.

Who was Blanche S. Byrdsong? Who was she a widow of? Did she live in the house when it was built? Where those kids in the house her children or grandchildren or family at all? Where did she come from? Where did she go?

When this building and plot of land is signed over to another Grantee, will they be concerned about who lived here? The walls know the stories but do not tell tales.