The word “house” means many different things to many different people.
House symbolizes a dream to those who wish to become homeowners.
A house, like the one my family inherited is a project, and not an insta makeover, as in what we see on TV.
A house is a home to some families, or a place to escape to the child ready to test his or her independence. The house is sometimes a place where furniture is covered by a sheet, and the adult children left behind must make decisions about the place where their parents had lived.
The house, our house, is meant to be a place to heal rather than divide. It keeps the table where we should sit and discuss. Something, we dream, that should stand for ages long after our footsteps disappear from the Earth’s fields.
I’ve shared the excerpt from the “Corrie’s House,” an unfinished poem before, but it means something deeper now after this past week’s events. Our daughter participated in the early renovation of her family’s house. With the exception of the windows, her bedroom was the first one renovated by her wonderful father in 2019. She also dreamed of her own house. She knew exactly where she wanted to build it.
Corrie’s house, unlike our project house or even the People’s House, was never built. But, the dream of a place close to her parents’ home, and open to all inspirations existed with the strength of Abraham Lincoln’s insistence that the Capitol Dome continue to be built during the Civil War.
Corrie’s dream of her house will forever stand in the hearts and minds those who love her.
Did you ever stop to hear about
the house of which Corrie dreamed?
Did you walk with her in the field
behind our house long before her
father cut for us a walking path,
and she often tripped over the
hidden sticks with little briars
that stuck to her dress, and I
nicknamed them the “sticky
sticks.” In the dip of the land
below the stair step hill where
apple trees used to grow, Corrie
said, “I want to build my house
here, Mommy, and I can look up
at your house.”
From the field, we gazed at the
house her grandfather had left
to his son, her father, and we
planned to recreate it room-by
-room, wall-by-wall, and in a time
without time measured by watches,
technologies, and the insta
neighborhood lines.
Corrie’s House by rebecca t. dickinson
When we say “our house,” is it something we’ve forgotten?
Something we leave abandoned like the buildings after Kristallnacht?
Will we rediscover integrity buried in caverns of our souls, longing to be redeemed, with a price far greater than gold?
When we say “our house,” will we rebuild as my family must continue to renovate our own home after a tornado and Corrie’s death?
When we recall January 6, 2021, do we remember, what will soon become twenty years ago, on September 11, 2001?
Will we remember the plane on which Americans fought back because it was heading for the People’s House?
When we say “our house,” will we rebuild …
together?
Corrie was only five-and-a-half-years-old with a ten-year-old’s understanding of the world. She constantly questioned. Corrie knew where she wanted to place her house, and what she wanted for her life.
Photos, Words, and Poem by Rebecca T. Dickinson. Corrie’s House is copyrighted by R.T. Dickinson 2020-2021.
Corrie's Season 