The House I Lived In

The original of this story has apparently disappeared.

The House I Lived In

Harry Buschman

It was much bigger when I was little. Our house was everything. My whole world … the universe in fact. I sat in a maple wood high chair my father made for me and I listened to my mother singing soft and low across the room as she made our supper on a wood burning stove. Everything was here, there was nothing else.

Then I looked across the vast empty space of our one room house, the house I lived in. There was a big bed in the corner, the bed my mother and father slept in and a small one for me at the side. There was a pine table in the middle of the room with two ladder backed pine chairs. Two candles burned on the table and two more by the kitchen stove. There was a bucket of split kindling wood at the side.

I seem to remember a hooked rug that lay on the floor between the bed and the table. I learned to walk on this rug. From the bed to the table back and forth, again and again … until I got it right. I remember a picture on the wall of an Indian on a horse, and through all the years of my childhood it was the only clue to the fact that there was a world outside the four walls of the house I lived in. This one room was my world, immeasurable … as boundless and infinite as the cosmos itself.

When I got my legs under me I walked to the door and opened it … out there I saw the fields and distant mountains. I looked up and saw the sky with castle clouds in the day and with stars at night too numerous for the counting.

The house I lived in became too small to hold me … smaller than a house to hold a bird, especially a bird who has seen the sky, the clouds and the stars.


 

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valdohren

…… And the bird has flown ! Lovely little story Harry, enjoyed reading it. It speaks of the contentment of childhood, until we grow up and seek wider horizons.
Val

Whale

As usual Harry, excellent prose, but this one raised too many questions that are unanswered. Did the parents never take the child out? Did the child never play out on a blanket, or get some fresh air to breathe? Was the child a prisoner in the house? If so, why? Where are the four grandparent, the uncles, the aunts? How come the child had no life but in the house for about 2 full years? Once the reader starts asking questions you have lost him.