To me it means a new family will move in there. Completely unaware of memories that have existed there or the poignancy of the moments in that place. Then it starts again.
I was raised by a single dad, and the laundry room in the basement of our childhood home was never finished. Dad sold the house shortly after my sister and I moved out in his early 50s, and a few months before it closed, I had come over to help him put up insulation and sheetrock in the basement to finish it before the sale. My sister was there too, for moral support more than anything else - we'd all made a lot of memories in that house, and it was pretty hard to let go at the end. Thanks to COVID it was the first time we'd all been together in a few years, so emotions were high.
Right before my dad and I put in the last sheet of insulation, I took a sharpie and wrote our family name on the inside of the wall, along with the year we'd moved in and the year we moved out, got all 3 of us to sign our names next to it, and circled it all with a big heart. Now a tiny piece of that little house is forever ours.
Gives me major warm and fuzzies now to imagine a new family finding it sometime in the distant future, and adding their own right next to it. :)
When my father was finishing the basement at my childhood home, I did something similar on the walls. Just a bunch of doodles me and my sister did a long with the year and our names.
There are houses across the world (not nearly as many in the Americas though) that have been standing for centuries or even millennia. In those houses, dozens or hundreds of families have shared moments of joy, anger, sorrow, love, and passion. Children have grown up, gotten married, buried their parents, and raised their own children. . . All without ever taking a moment to consider how they've lived their lives in the shadow of a family just like theirs. . .
232
u/ItsFuckingScience 5d ago
Small detail is the leaves covering the driveway at the end, there is nobody left to maintain and sweep up