An Empty House

I awoke this morning in an empty house. All our guests are gone after a week of celebration.  I could even get into my study this morning.  Ethan and Eleni claimed my study as their guest room and slept here on their air mattresses throughout the time of their visit.  There is a world of difference between a full house and an empty house.

A full house can keep one mighty busy.  There are meals to plan and fix, dishes to wash and put away, all routines are lost, and so much more.  An empty house allows for more flexibility—you can just fix whatever you want for dinner without checking to see if it fits the needs of your guests, and you can just let the dishes soak in the sink if you want to do so.  I suppose the writer of Ecclesiastes had it right—there is a time and a season for everything, both for a full house and for an empty house—and neither need be considered either “a good thing or a bad thing” or one more valuable or meaningful than the other.  Both are “winning hands.”

In a full house there is great joy in being together.  In an empty house there is also  great joy in being alone and remembering the time when the house was full.  The memories of the full house  live on.  I felt that this morning when, in my stocking feet, I stepped on a Lego piece that was missed in the picking up of yesterday.

So it is that I sit here in this empty house this morning, remembering the fun I experienced yesterday with my youngest grandchildren at the zoo.  Suddenly the house is full again, and by changing the words of James Whitcomb Riley’s poem just a little bit, I can say of this empty house of mine:

As one who cons at evening

o’er an album, all alone,

And muses on the faces 

of the friends that he has known,

So I turn the leaves of Fancy,

til, in shadowy design,

I remember the smiling faces of 

the full house that once was mine.