Reflective Wanderer

God gave all men all earth to love,
  But, since our hearts are small
Ordained for each, one spot should prove
  Beloved over all.
---Kipling

A house did not know me, and I did not know it. Then one day my fiancée and I went to look at it, and we became acquainted. We thought her perfect; placed in a sweet, older neighborhood near a large park. She was very small, but there was enough room for two, and we waited with baited breath to see if we’d get to further our relationship. We got a yes from the landlady, so we began to prepare her for ourselves. I brought Emily back to her, carrying my new bride over the threshold. We spent two full years in her. What an intimate thing a house is; it sees you at your best and at your worst. Like most things closest to you it is taken for granted. Eventually you learn where the light switch is in the dark. You figure out where home is in relation to all the tasks that take you away from it. The best walks are found, and its neighbors cease to be strangers. I grew my first flowers close to her front door, then expanded further gardens along the driveway. Fellowship with close friends, dating my girl, and glorious solitude all took place around and within her. I worked and prayed and studied and loved and hated, sang and slept and cried and thought right there in the house and front yard of the place on La Pasada Boulevard. Making tea and listening to audiobooks in the kitchen, dancing in the rain, watching movies, talking in bed, becoming friends, then enemies, and back to friends again, all the aspects of living life together with your sweetheart, were lived out in their first infancy there. If you could go to her, and hear her walls speak, you’d know me better than anyone else in the world. But we’ve left her. It was sold and we moved on. The house still stands, but it is no longer animated with our life, and never will be again. So goodbye to the Hobbit Hole, our first home.