Imagine A House, Cassia Scarborough

Imagine a house.

A mansion, two stories, no three, three stories tall. The kind with wide, arching windows and window seats set against the wall and sliding glass doors and big rooms and lots of sunlight. Imagine that it is set at the edge of the woods a few miles from town, the kind of place that deer and raccoons and blue jays like to wander. Outside there is a garden with fruit trees and tomatoes and roses and the kind of flowers that you can smell at dusk that make you smile without meaning to.

Imagine it. Forget what is possible for a moment.

Dream.

Inside, the rooms are clean but slightly cluttered in a very comfortable sort of way. The living room has a pair of worn couches smothered in pillows. The kitchen floor is tiled in reds and yellows. There’s a basket of fruit from the trees outside on the counter. There are jars of spices along a rack. On the windowsill is a chocolate cake that someone just took out of the oven. A tabby cat is sleeping on a throw rug by the dining table. It’s that kind of a house.

Can you see it?

A dog plummets down the stairway, its tail wagging and its tongue lolling to one side as it races from the tribe of laughing children who pursue it. There are seven of them, some boys and some girls, some with dark hair, maybe three with auburn locks and one with short, blonde curls. The seventh is a boy with spiked violet hair. They all live in this house, along with their parents. How many families live here? Let’s pretend that there are four.

Imagine it.

Each adult or pair adults, and every child has their own room in the house. The parents and their children’s rooms are close together of course. The children’s rooms are covered in murals of life sized dragons and unicorns while the adult’s rooms reflect their own interests. Imagine what your room would look like. The parents all have different passions, different jobs. Perhaps one is a chef, and another is an actor, another a business owner and a fourth a doctor. Maybe one is a writer and another a biologist while his wife is an architect.

Whatever. Imagine it.

They all help to pay for the house and the bills. They all help to keep things clean. They all help to take care of the children. They’re all friends, of course sometimes even friends fight but they get over their differences. Wouldn’t you be nice if it meant that you could live in a house like this?

Imagine it.

The children don’t go to school, why should they when they have a chef, an actor, a business owner, a doctor, a writer, a biologist, and an architect to teach them? But they do have friends, in fact, hardly a day goes by when the tribe of seven is not joined by one or two of the local children.

Imagine.

When they grow up the children will be encouraged to go out and live their lives, but after a few years of total independence and travel or collage or whatever, they choose to go back to the sunny house with the window seats and their smiling elders. They are given bigger rooms and if they fall in love, their lovers are welcomed into the house as well.

And so it goes.

One day new children will race down the stairs, and grow up being taught by their parents and their parents’ closets friends and their grandparents and their grandparents’ closest friends. And when the grandparents die?

Imagine a thin gravel path that leads to a small grove of trees. Beside each tree is a stone, old and weather beaten, and carved deep into each stone is a name and a poem, a memory, a date. These trees were planted with the ashes of their namesakes, and now they live on in their place.

Imagine.

There is a library in the house, a huge one, where you can read fantasy and history and the stories of the people who lived in the house before you.

Imagine it.

Dream of it.

Imagine a home.