There Once Was a House

There once was a house. 1

This house, through no fault of its own, was a small house. And, through no virtue of its own, it was a pretty house. This small and pretty house was also a grey house and a stone house. You see, the stone that made it a stone house also made it a grey house. Not cinder block grey, but a natural dark grey that you see in old stone walls, where one rock is piled onto another and another and then another rock on that, and so on, with only the another rocks keeping it together.2

On one of the more obvious sides of the house there was a tunnel made of wooden lattices between the side of the house and the neighbor house. Some wisteria climbed up and over one of the lattices and began to grow and intermingle with the grape vines on the other lattice. If you walked through this tunnel, the light filtering through the holes and patches in the leaves and vines bounced through the green light that came in from everywhere else, and as the sun appeared from behind the trees and hills in the east and moved across the sky to descend behind the trees and hills in the west, the patches of light changed colors as the sun rays fell from different angles.3

The roof of this house was a tile roof; not the bright red tiles you find in California and the southwestern United States, but an old, slightly mossy dark tile, with lots of pine needles filling the places where one slope of the roof met another slope and created a little valley between the two slopes. There were quite a few such valleys on this roof, and so there were a lot of pine needles from the lofty firs and cedar trees that grew out of the silvery green lawn, with contained as much moss among the grass as there was grass itself. 4

The combination of grass and moss made it a thick and squishy lawn, which was probably nice to walk on in bare feet. It was obvious, however, that no one had walked on this lawn in a while, because springing up everywhere and a few other places were grape hyacinths, snowdrops, and crocuses with their gold white and purples striped petals molded like the sides of those Korean ceramic vases and pitchers with etched designs of cranes and chrysanthemums that one finds in glass cases in the twelfth-century art rooms in museums.5

The door of the house was dark brown, with no screen of doorbell, but a door knocker in the shape of a Mandala cross decorated with birds and leaves. A shoe brush in the shape of a hedgehog was conspicuously crouched on the on the small stone entrance porch, peering up with beady black eyes that are too big for its narrow snout and whiskers. On the other side of the alcove there was a bronze Canada goose, each smooth diamond shaped feather interlocking perfectly; the curves of its neck and head suggesting realistic indignation and offended pride, likely caused by the unfortunate wooden top hat balanced precariously on its head. 6

One day, next to the violet mailbox outside the front fence, the stiff wire ends of a for sale sign violated the yellow and red Holland tulips that bloom in the thin soil strip on the old sidewalk. 7

Then, the for sale sign was removed, and bulldozers came and laid waste to the dark grey another rocks. A neighbor rescued the goose, but not the hedgehog. The wooden top hat fell in the debris of the grape lattice,it's rim was chipped off, exposing the clean golden wood beneath the faded and dirty black paint. An uncovered crocus bulb, sliced in half, lay in the shadow of the dismembered lattice, uprooted wisteria vines still clinging to the wooden frame.8

There once was a house.9