Pilgrim’s Inn

I have mentioned our house before. Just now the walls are comfortably bulging with one of my sons and his family transitioning with us on their way to their next ‘home’. That is four people, including an eight-year-old and a five-year-old plunked down in the middle of our settled older-people routines, T.V. habits and idiosyncrasies.

It might take some adjusting for me, but this old house seems to sigh with contentment when we use it to the fullest. It’s not a big house, or a fancy house. The carpet in it is 30 something years old. Some rooms have been updated. Some haven’t (yet!). But it cheerfully and flexibly serves the comings and goings of our family, and has since the day we moved in.

Through the years this has included a couple of sisters and their families, a foster son, a couple of teenagers that chose not to have abortions, and a young homeless guy. It has accommodated several daughters with children while husbands were deployed overseas…and seen the comings and goings of two different youth groups.

Within these walls I birthed three babies and watched two of my grandchildren make their entrance. My husband and I have had furious, ridiculous fights; learned how to live with each other, learned what love really means…for most of the almost 40 years of our marriage. This house understands the ministry of presence, embracing without rancor or judgement our complicated journeys–the processes of growth–pain, laughter, anger, sadness, meanness, kindness, prayer, quietness, all of it.

Right now we are cutting holes in walls and putting up plywood in the hot water heater part of the our utility room. It’s a dark and dusty, more-outside-than-in, part of our house with access to the crawlspace. And lo and behold we found the skeleton of an animal resting there! (We think it was an opposum.)

It is a loud, dusty messy process fixing up a 70 year old house, but I get this feeling that, for the house, it’s like a scratching an itch.

Thank you house.

***By the way, our house has a name—“Pilgrim’s Inn” shamelessly stolen from Elizabeth Gouge.