Our old house has become a good friend over the decades we have lived there. Apart from hosting our children from youngsters to happy adults, and us from career junkies to something rather less dependent on the whims of equally addicted corporate bosses in search of their next leadership “fix”, it has looked after us in many ways.
It is a good teacher of the need for preemptive care, the fact it has a history before us, and will have a future after us. It is a sanctuary with its own unique characteristics when times are tough or just uncertain and has a sense of being grounded; of having an authority all of its own, that holds us.
Legally, we own it, although it takes only a moment’s contemplation to accept the illusory nature of that in a world where we are not some form of the landed gentry. It has looked after maybe a dozen generations before us. It will care for who knows how many after us unless a future owner decides to replace it with a (tem…
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