Empty Rooms, Empty Rooms

When we were young, my siblings and I walked home from the library during the Chicago summers. Our route passed an impressive, two story house on an expansive lawn. It had dark, sage-colored siding, and white trim with shiny black shutters. We considered it a mansion, and would heatedly fight about which of us would own it. Funny how often we argued about something to which we had no rights.

Sometimes I'll pass an elderly manse and that old "big house" longing returns. I always figured I would fill it's many rooms with children- my own and adopted. How else could one justify owning a house that big?

We own a home now (with the help of the bank). It's a sweet, brick ranch from the 1950's, and I really love it.  Ironically, I occasionally wonder if we should find a smaller place. Not that it's a big house, but we have two empty bedrooms. One is a guest room, but the other is just empty. Empty of life, anyway.

At the moment, it contains a queen box spring that I need to sell and odd pieces of furniture that don't fit anywhere else in the house. My new sewing machine has also recently settled there. But it's still an empty, misfit room.

Every month I wander into hoping, realizing belatedly that I've done so, that perhaps this time next year the room will contain a little life.  Without regard for common sense, my imagination creates murals for the walls and curtains for the windows, places crib and rocking chair, and scatters toys across the floor. It fills the space with laughter and cry, coo and lullaby.

Every month the hoping is confronted by reality and the empty room, which feels so much more empty in the aftermath of hope. How is it possible to miss a life that has never been? Perhaps it is better not to have a room that can be so empty.

A few years back, I visited my home town and we drove past the old, much debated mansion. It seemed to have diminished in size and magnificence. The sage green paint was dingy and peeling, the black shutters faded to grey, and the lawn pocked with yellow patches and crab grass. Reality had slithered up to our mansion as well.

Are hope an reality always at odds? Where does the persistent hoping come from? It can't possibly come from this world. There's too much bad news for hope to be borne here.

Maybe hope is only realized in a different kind of dwelling. I just haven't gotten home yet.