My Grandpa’s house went on the market this week.
This is the most sacred place in the world to me. I wrote about it here once upon a time.
It’s been seven years since my Grandpa passed, but his home has stayed in the family – being rented out.
But my mother and her siblings agreed the time has come to sell it.
My mom sent me the link to the listing. It looks so empty without all our memories crammed in there.
They cut down the giant tree that housed the birds and squirrels my Grandpa loved to feed.
Gone is all the furniture – the organ, the wood-paneled bubble TV, the broken Papasan chair us cousins used to sit in when we played Sega Genesis in the basement.
Our pictures no longer line the hallway.
I smiled to recognize the hideous wood paneling and that bathroom zebra-print floor. The bones of the house are still there, but just the bones. None of the guts that made it so special to me.
I am sad that this house is going to be owned by someone outside our family who has no knowledge of the eight children who grew up here and their twenty-four grandchildren who spent holidays here. But I hope they enjoy the creek and the strawberry and raspberry fields and the woods and the old barn. I hope they can appreciate it in their own way, even though it won’t be in the same way any of us appreciate it. I hope they feel the complete peace that comes from being somewhere special. I hope it becomes a sacred place to some other family like it was to our’s.
People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel…but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make. ~ Eudora Welty
(I don’t know how many times I’ve used this quote already – I seem to always be thinking of it)
holly pelesky 
Leave a Reply