My Grandmother’s House

I have never had to say goodbye to a house, never had to watch a house I loved pass into the hands of others.  And that is why the sale of Hamrick Hall has been a peculiarly painful idea for me.  Having my sister’s wedding in my grandparent’s house this winter has culminated a lifetime of fond memories and associations.  From my earliest recollection it has held a fascination for me.  How I used to love to sit up in Grandma’s bedroom on great-great-great Aunt Olive’s settee and hear stories about my ancestors.  She would show me pictures of Piety Green, the plucky young woman who married her father-in-law when her husband and his wife died so that she could stay on at the plantation.  She would bring out the fragile lace sleeve of my great-great grandmother’s wedding gown and would speak of her so lovingly that I felt honored to be named after her.  We pored over old pictures and I took notes in a little composition book, and I think that my interest satisfied a need in both of us.  Mine a hunger to live the past, if only for an hour or two, and hers to entrust treasured family relics into the heart of the younger generation.  That house always meant history to me, my history, part of where I came from.  Dismantling it for the sale has been like desecrating a shrine.

I don’t believe that it’s too far off the mark to say that God cares about the souls of houses.  He speaks so much of the dwellings of His loved people; He nurtures our inborn love of home into a transcendent longing for heaven—“In My Father’s house are many rooms…I am going there to prepare a place for you…”

A house that has been loved, that has been truly lived in is no more a pile of mortar and timber than our human selves are mere bones and skin.  It cannot help but assume the nature of those who have called it home; it is only natural that the blessings and the vicissitudes of those it has sheltered should be cherished away in the secret of its walls.  I feel that about the Ruff House all of the time…