Webster, always unsentimental, says a house is a building for people to live in. The key to its meaning is the phrase "live in." A house is a warm and clattering kitchen redolent with magic odors that linger with a man forever. It is a warm spot on the rug before an easy chair, a worn spot on the linoleum to mark the gossip of l0,000 dish washings. It is a penciled scale on a door jamb that marks a youngster's proud growth. It is knee-high fingerprints on the wallpaper. Ancient echoes rebound eternally from the walls of a house- a child's cry, the easy silence in the midst of easy talk with friends, a long-forgotten argument, the ring of a happy woman's laughter. A house is an endless procession of meals solemn with grace and lively with chatter. It is a place of long dreams in the long night and the whisper of love and tenderness. A house is storm windows, screens, and where-does-the-money-go. It is clean the garage, burn the rubbish, let the cat out, patch the roof, mow the lawn. It is the pipe that pounds, the window that sticks, the creaking third step from the top, the furnace that declares its independence on a deep-freeze day in January. A house is an attic tumbling with the dusty disorder of yesteryears - the boxes, trunks and crates filled with the dresses, the pictures, the dolls, the toys by which, through tears and smiles, we cling so desperately to that which is forever gone. A house is a doorway of greeting and farewell. It is an overflowing bookcase, a flicker of firelight on a shadowed wall, a spot on the rug where the baby threw his grapejuice in a fit of anger. It is a workbench littered with heaven-knows-what. Bib or small, rich or mean, a house is an illusion, a thing of hopes and dreams and ghosts. Habit and tolerance and hope and love hold it together. And of these, the strongest nail and the most enduring mortar is love. While this is not humor, I thought my fellow geneologists might enjoy this. Edna ==== GenHumor Mailing List ==== !^NavFont02F065B0007NGHHM5D90A5 Maggie's World of Courthouse Dust & Genealogy Fever http://www.infinet.com/~dzimmerm/mindex.html *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* God Put Me On Earth to Accomplish a Certain Number of Things. Right Now I am so far behind, I will never die. --- Unknown *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*