This house is an echo.

This house is an echo. 

Decades of hopes, raised and dashed, of loneliness & love & trials, sounding off in the distance. It’s battered and broken, every corner duck-taped. It’s been raised and rebuilt, fortified a hundred times over but still it slants, shoulder to the winds that gallop across the surrounding fields.

But it’s where we gather. It’s where we eat & drink & celebrate our victories & cry our losses. Where we bring our little ones who now outnumber us, to play & scream, foraging through boxes filled with old toys set aside years before, just for them, as if they’d been expected. At night they’ll giggle in their sleeping bags on a giant indoor camping trip, floors littered with cousins, sisters, brothers, as we drink & laugh & talk our way through the night. The Hordes. The Family.

This house is an echo
where life stands still
warm & soothing
like an old winter coat.