A little house holds big memories..

I was driving home from my horse lesson on Saturday and happened to notice a few houses along the drive. Nothing big or fancy. In fact, they were rather small and a bit shabby. I wondered what the people who lived there were like. What kind of life they had.
When Brian & I were first married I found a little house on the outskirts of town. It was a small, shabby house. I didn't just see a run down, neglected, empty house. I saw a house that could be a home. A house we could fix up and care for. I found out who owned the house and set about convincing them to rent it to us.
That was our first "house". Since leaving my parent's home I had lived in trailers and apartments. When Brian & I first married we shared a basement apartment with his friend, Tim. That little house was a big deal to me.
It took alot of work, and alot of love, to fix up that little house, but it was some of the happiest times for Brian, Kierra, & I. Brianne was conceived the first week we lived there (after months of trying). It held good times and great memories for us. I think back to those times and can't help but smile and laugh over some of the adventures and mishaps we experienced way back then.
We took the small backyard full of overgrown, dead tomato plants and made it a green, grassy space for Kierra to play in. We repaired and painted room by room. We changed out light fixtures and faucets one by one. We made it ours. It had huge lilac bushes on either side of the front door. You could open the windows when they were in bloom and the scent would fill the house. I still love the smell of fresh lilacs.
I sometimes wish for the simplicity of our lives back then. That house wasn't much bigger than an efficiency apartment. But it was enough for us. We lived paycheck to paycheck on meager military pay. But it was enough for us. We have lived in many places since then. Yet none of the houses we have lived in ever felt as much like home to me as that little house in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I don't have dreams about going back to New Mexico, or New York. I sometimes dream about our house in Swaffham, England, but I dream most often of Wyoming.
It seems nothing is simple anymore. I find myself snowballed by so many things to do and not enough time to do them. My "to do" list is never ending. So it is not so farfetched that when I see a shabby, simple little house, I daydream about a little house in Wyoming that stands there still. I daydream about a life that was simple, and safe, and held so much promise for us and the family we had started. I daydream about lilacs and green grass, about sun and snow. And for those few moments my heart smiles and my life is simple again.