Day Three: Going Through the (E)motions

There are pieces of old building that will stand through the next millennium, no matter how hard you try to shatter them.

There are pieces which will fall to dust if you simply breathe on them.

You never know which is which until you start touching the parts.  

You try to stay strong.  After all, you can't give up now; it's just the beginning of the ride.  But it is hard when things shatter and fall. You let it go, and know that the falling down has to happen so that the rising up can occur.  You think of the farmers who mortared the old stones with their bare hands so that they could ferment their harvested grapes.  You see the crooked wooden pieces, the bits of brick they gathered and used.  You see the veins in the hands, the hairs on the wrists, the dirt and sand under the nails, the small cuts and bruises on the tanned skin.

You see those things in the piles which are getting swept away.  

You try to keep what is whole, what is intact, what still works and is solid.  Whole 400 year old bricks.  Massive 200 year old wood beams which the worms ignored because they were too hard.  You cringe when something crashes that you had just decided you wanted to keep.  You feel ridiculously self absorbed, as if the world will fall apart which each sacrificed brick. You go for a walk to relax.  You try to focus on something else to keep the bigger picture in mind.

 The costs are going up. Your heart is falling down.

Why bother?  Because it is our property and it is our job?  As if we could ever really possess a property like this.  As if.  I believe this house has been put in our hands for safe keeping.  And that is what we are trying to do -- keep it safe. Make it strong again so when the next come, and those after the next, that it is still standing and can protect them too.  

I have 2109 in my head.  A hundred years from now.  Will the house be intact? Will people still be living and breathing and dying and giving birth here, as they have for the last four hundred years?  Will someone rebuild the pool, replace the solar panels with whatever the new technology is?  Will someone make pizza in the what will then be 500 year old pizza oven?

I must remember to etch a little signature in the cement in the wine cellar.  To let the people of 2109 know that there was once a couple of people who worked very hard on this house.  That some parts of the building will have once again turned to dust, but that Phoenix rises from that dust.  That those people from a hundred years ago hoped against hope that the house would be standing, still intact and proud, for the people of 2209...