Summer Evening in an Old House

It is a wonderful life, you know.

This early evening, Tom puttered around in the basement, as he is wont to do. Naomi cleaned her two rooms upstairs for pending company and let her cats run around with ours on the middle floor, where I sat soaking up another summer sunset.

I dialed the radio to Big Band era music and it played as did the cats, one of them meowing over and over because of the toy mouse she'd captured (and still held) in her mouth. I sat, reading, in our sunroom with all the windows opened wide. Who can ever get enough of a deepening summer breeze? Beneath a pool of light, I sat at the 1940's metal table with a book from the same era, occasionally flicking away a tail on the page from another of the cats. 

And at the low window sill just in front of me, sat yet another cat watching the neighbors come and go.

I, too, watched the neighbors walk past, and then I thought of Mrs. Murphy. She and her husband built our house nearly 70 years ago--she outlived Mr. Murphy and remained in this home for 50 years, total. I wondered if she, also, used to sit here in the sunroom reading and listening to Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller. I looked around at these walls and thought, " Which colors did Mrs. Murphy choose to paint them? Did she and I ever use the same ones?"

When we first moved here, it was easy to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Murphy having lived within these rooms, because even though the house had one other owner 9 years in between, it still felt like the Murphys' house. Mr. Murphy built this Craftsman bungalow for his wife and then they moved here from Canada. I could see them sitting in here on pre-war furniture, both reading newspapers beneath floor lamps. Or I could imagine Mr. Murphy building things in the basement while his wife folded clothes farther down near the laundry chute. And clearly I saw the widowed Mrs. Murphy, years later, sitting on the front porch handing out candy to the neighborhood children on summer evenings just like this one (this story from my neighbor who knew the Mrs. Murphy).

But as the years pass, she becomes foggier to me because somewhere in the midst of painting all the walls, hanging homemade curtains and rearranging furniture, this became our house. It no longer feels like the Murphy's house, because it isn't. We've made it ours.

Oh, the Murphys will always be a vital part of this house's history. But right now, tonight? Tom, Naomi and I still live here with beating hearts. And though I imagine Mrs. Murphy sitting in this sunroom on a quiet summer night just as I am, she will always belong to another time. 

It's our turn now to live in this enchanted cottage. And as Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote, "...now is now. It can never be a long time ago."


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