This house..

 I wonder about this house.

We tiled some of the backsplash in the kitchen. The tile are mini subway tile. There is no color to them. It is supposed to be ivory but on the wall they look colorless, textury, ghostlike. Shiny, clean, new, perfect. Different.

I keep wondering about this house. With every change we make..every floor..every fixture..every wire..every stick of furniture..every new appliance..I keep wondering if I am building, designing, redesigning my sarcophagus,  my mausoleum. I wonder if I will die within these walls. I wonder if I will haunt this house.

I remember walking through this house..long ago. I was at the tail end of one tale. The next chapter, the next story had not yet begun. Yet, I walked through this house..saw the brick..saw how the light slanted through the windows..where the doors where..what sound vibrated through here..the fireplace.. the basement..the flower box beneath the picture window..and I remember thinking, "Good bones. This place has good bones."

And I stayed. I started living here at the end of one incarnation of my life and I still live there through another. So many changes..new windows and doors. New roofs. New floors, new paint, rooms that change and morph. New sinks, new cabinets, new bathtubs, new colors, new furniture. It all gets old. Gets changed. Changed again.

But the bones are the same. I am the same. I am different. But I am the same woman who lives here. Who will continue to live here. No matter the changes..in the rooms..in my skin..in my life..in the story around me. This house has the same bones and so do I. Likely I will die here. In this same-but-changed little house. Little, little brick house. Same light slanting through the windows. Same odd sounds, odd echoes at night. 

I don’t like the place where this house is. A small town. A too-small town with suspicious small town attitudes and people. I keep thinking I am different. A wild daisy whose seed wandered into the wrong placid field. Here, I took root and grew alone among the corn stalks and soy bean vines. Alone.

I wonder when I will wake up and my life will have begun again without me. Perhaps my husband will be gone. Perhaps my children will have grown up and  blown away into their futures like chaff. What will that tile backsplash look like then? Will it be changed? Will it be the same but old and clouded with time and dirt? Dated..like me? What will my death be like..and how will I be? Dusty, in the shadows, watching unseen..as someone else walks through my walls, breaths in a sigh, and whispers, "Yeah..good bones."