A House Well Loved

In regard to houses, love is a force of nature.  It fends off gravity, wind, and heat.  

It doesn't take long for an abandoned house to really look shabby, dog eared, long in the tooth.  If a house stands empty for long at all, even if the folks who live in it are only gone for a few weeks, dust, leaves and weeds start creeping in.  I think old left-behind houses look senile and bedraggled, unhappy.

I went for a walk today and noticed one or two houses on my route that have been left to their own devices for a long time.  Paint is peeling, wood is cracking; dirt is sifting into cracks and splits in the paving bricks. Little weeds are taking a toehold and turning them into real land claims, splitting pavement pieces farther apart.  The inexorable forces of nature are turning them into hovels, little by little.

I've noticed that wallpaper hanging on the walls needs warm bodies walking past to remain smooth.  The carpet on the floors needs feet padding across it to stay supple.  Windows need voices vibrating off of them to keep them crack free.  Seems as soon as a house is left alone for a while, it realizes it and its windows all break and the place looks bedraggled and sad.

We build our houses and they need us inside of them as much as we need to be inside them.  There might be something else to it, but I think it's love, one way or another.