The house with a broken heart...

That is what we now call my childhood home. It belonged to my great grandfather who raised my dad's dad along with 10 other brothers and sisters. It was a farmhouse that witnessed Polish dances, weddings, funerals, many parties, games of checkers, Saturday nights of Hee-Haw, and endless hours of rocking on the front of porch. The porch is gone now, along with the outhouse which remained until we moved in fourteen years ago and added indoor plumbing. My father's dream was to renovate his grandfather's old, broken down farmhouse. So, that is exactly what we did, for seven years. Sitting on almost 200 acres of land, it was the home that inspired the imaginations of three young children. In my mind, it is the home that I go back to over and over and over again. It is the place where I run through fields and wade through creeks, the home where I lay in the long grass and watch clouds drift over me. It is the home where my brother and I chase each other through corn fields and fly over snow-covered banks in our tobaggan. It is a million memories that have only emotions attached, memories that I could not explain, except to say that they shaped who I am today. We were the last to live in this old house. We were the last to enjoy the comforts of its four walls. It is now sunken off of its foundation. My own bedroom has a skylight where large tree branches have fallen through. The windows are broken; vines cover the siding. There is no longer a porch and the yard is more like an overgrown field. This "farm" was once so prominent that the whole hill was named after our family name. It is now forgotten, grown over, old, broken.

I was there today. My sister and I walked the old paths with insects flying around our heads and prickers stabbing through our jeans. The creek still runs beneath the ground, evident by our mud soaked sneakers. A sign of life.

Another sign of life...roses blooming where they have been blooming for a hundred years. They have not given up. Even when my aunt transplanted a few pieces to where she lives, hours away, they surprisingly revived and began to bloom again.

Bittersweet. This place, a conduit of life in my childhood, is now dying. No matter how I feel, I cannot revive it. I cannot go back and repair the damage. My place is not there anymore. The only thing left for this house is to fall in. The only thing left for the land is to continue on its own. The only thing left for me is the memory.

I feel as if I left with a broken heart. And when I look at the rest of my family, my grandfather, my aunts and uncles, my parents, my siblings, I see that in a way all of our hearts have been broken. It wasn't the house itself, no. The house only symbolizes the heart of our family. It is a mystery to me, where the broken heart began, and even more so how it has spread to the members of our family tree.

Lord, you are close to those who are brokenhearted. Restore us once again. Restore the joy of our salvation, and renew a right spirit within us.