Empty Houses | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Empty Houses | Previous Challenge Entry
By Lisa Gavin
10/09/14
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After thirty years, I stood looking at the empty house. Nestled in five acres of woods, it looks out on farm land purchased by my family one hundred years ago. Land our family managed to hold during the Great Depression when many lost their homes. Now, the front porch screens waved in the breeze, severed from their panes. The beehive, once buzzing with the activity of many little honey bees, had disappeared. Long, wild grass grew where potatoes and lettuce once flourished in the garden plot. Gone were the mounds of tiger lilies my great-grandmother planted decades before, choked by years of overgrowth. My time there was short, rolled into week-long summer vacations with my dad. I learned to drive on rural roads before the legal age, a mailbox my only victim. I walked the woods and farm fields with my sister, and explored the Indian burial ground on the farm’s border. My sister even discovered an arrowhead left behind. This afternoon is warm as I stand and look at what remains of that house, abandoned to the past. I was happy there, but it was a temporary shelter.

There is another house I still drive by from time to time, closed behind heavy curtains. It sits in a subdivision where corn grew tall, strawberries grew wild, and farm families in another century buried their children under homemade gravestones. Summers were long, and autumn brought beautiful colors to the dying leaves as school bells rang again. Snow days in winter were an adventure, putting on new mittens and hats to make footprints in the frozen snow. It was in this house that I gave my life to Christ along with other children attending a backyard Vacation Bible School. From that time my life was no longer my own, I had been bought with a price by my Savior. That decision was one reason why living in that house was the best part of my childhood-- one reason I still drive by just to look.

The places I have lived hold a part of me, and I hold those places in my heart. Some memories are happy, others are sad. Part of who I am was decided in every house of my childhood. There were several—we didn't stay put for long. With the packing of boxes, the decisions of what to keep and what to throw away, there was the reminder that these places are temporary.

I find empty houses sad; void of care, laughter, and lives being lived inside their walls. They remind me of what once was. I like to think of the happy times inside, when the empty rooms were filled with our furnishings and our family pictures hung on their walls. But like life, they are temporary. When I look at empty houses, I know the only promise is an eternal home. One that is being prepared just for me, where there will always be life, laughter, and perfect Love.

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