I am longing for someplace old. For weathered planks to run hands over, to feel history and age. To live with a sense of time.
Our rental complex is new. Only a few months old when we moved in. White walls, white cabinets, white white white. I thought we'd have an eerie feeling here, as the grounds which were built upon hold dark stories of a different time, not so long ago. There's a cemetery on the grounds, one old building remains, and weepy trees line the windy road up our hill.
But the walls are white. The past covered for a fresh start. Wiped away for a clean slate.
I don't feel like we belong here. It's too new. Too clean {though not my kitchen floors... } too cookie cutter.
Character is what it's missing. Laugh lines and wrinkles and sun spots.
And it's not our place to make it weathered and humble. Home. It's our home, temporarily. Two years as of next month. Hopefully just one year more, and then we can find our place. The one that will speak to us, open its {probably} squeaky doors and ask for us to oil it and make it ours. We'll embrace and incorporate its past into our daily lives.
The walls will not be white. They will tell stories, and the floors will creek as we make our new paths worn in the middle of the night for tucking in and snuggles, making the monsters disappear. The new imperfections that we bring with us will twist and bend with the old... and they will be the tiny details that we remember best. The crack in a cabinet door. The drafty corner in the sitting room, where extra quilts lay waiting to be used. The pencil marks that stop time for a moment in the lives of growing children.
Our messy lives will not stick out like a brightly colored mitten left haphazardly in the snow.
We will breathe new life into our home, and it will breathe it's old soul freely into ours. And we will tend to it's needs, as it provides us warmth and comfort. We will be home in an old rustic space. One day. We will be home.