Bringing down the house!

Perhaps we should have a moment of silence for the death of an old home….


Now it’s time to celebrate!! Huge shout out to Casey Nelson and his new construction company for doing a job so many of us have longed to do for years—tear down the old decrepit reminder of what was left of the fruit ranch many of us now live in. Living directly across the street from this house it has often been a yearning of mine to see it gone and replaced with something much easier on the eyes. I’m hopeful that come September or October a new, beautiful house will be in its place.

With that said this experience has caused me to reflect on this old house. What is it with our obsession to discard old and broken things and replace them with new and shiny? Certainly this house was unfit to live in, there was mold in every corner, asbestos in the plumbing, the foundation was cracked, and many other smaller, crawlier inhabitants had taken over residence. The cost to renovate and make the house livable was nearly the same price as rebuilding, so there was no sense in trying to save it.

Which made me start thinking about my own home. In a hundred years what will become of my house that I love so dear, that I work every day to clean and maintain.

The house across the street from me was over a hundred years old. Originally built in the late 1800’s, it has had two additions throughout the years. Babies were born in the house, people died in the house. Someone sweated and stressed and worked to pay its mortgage. Someone else faithfully cleaned and cared and maintained the structure. That house has survived over a hundred Christmases. It survived the Depression, two World Wars, recessions, integration. No one alive remembers the day it was built. When it was first built there were no automobiles, only horse drawn carriages. Orem, Utah was nothing but long stretches of stunning fruit orchards leading down to Utah lake. Life was slow, simple, and this house has stood by, watching the world change. It watched the freeway emerge, saw tress were sliced down around it to make room for large expensive homes, and it remained standing, a lonely test to time, as the world changed.

And now it’s gone forever.

Interesting how your paradigm can so quickly change. This ugly house across the street from me truly does deserve a moment of silence.

It is also good for me to remember every world thing that we hold, that we work for and strive to build, will very likely mean little to nothing in a hundred years. In the end everything turns to dust. And yet the things that never dissolve, that only grow stronger with time, are our relationships with people, as well as our memories. Although the house is gone, those who lived there, who loved it, will hold that forever. Today I will be cleaning my house, again, but I know that the memories that my family and I are building will be impressing into the walls of our structure and they will last eternally, even if and when these walls come down to make room for the latest technological advancements. It’s good to remember I don’t have this home for the house, I have it for my family.