The Secrets in the Walls

When I first entered Aunt Nancy's apartment on Heritage Hill, I must have been somewhere near the age of 7? 

Heritage Hill is a neighborhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan that includes dozens? hundreds of big old beautiful (sometimes ramshackle) houses.  And until I went to visit one of my favorite Aunts there - I don't know that I had ever been in someone's apartment.  I definitely Had never been in a space that embraced it's age.  Hardwood floors, dark wood trim. 

Everything evoked the past.  I had no idea that people could choose to live in spaces that had such a strong sense of history. 

My mom always warned us when we were young that if we fought, our words would be registered in the walls and in the future, when the scientists learned out to retrieve them, everyone would know the things we had said.  The way this landed on my imagination was that I presumed that all the words and all the feelings of all the people were stored in the walls, in the floors and in the objects that they touched.  The world so steeped in stories and meanings that to arrive now? So late in the Human History Sequence was like inheriting the greatest treasure trove anyone could ever want. 

Secrets and longings and happinesses and tragedies permeating every old space in the word.

I love old spaces and places.