Welcome home

A story about the inherited weight of what is never said.

by Sofie Kjellerup Christensen, Denmark.

1500 words.

Sofie is part of the Bee Writing Lab.

Feel free to make a cup of coffee if you want. The kitchen is at the end of the hall on the left. The door is always open. Unfortunately, the electric kettle no longer works. We think it was a loose connection that eventually became so loose that it completely disappeared. We have tried fixing it with duct tape and massaging the small on-off button and that worked for a while, but now it is impossible to turn it on. It is probably also for the best because as you can see it is filled with lime from the water. You can have a look for yourself. It is right there on the right. Instead, you can heat water on the stove in the small pot. In general, you should be aware that to get water into the house you will have to go out into the garden and turn on the water supply in the shed. This also applies if you for example want to take a shower or use the toilet. The keys are hanging on a string at the back of the shed. When you have the water you need, it is important that you turn off the water connection again. Otherwise, the faucets will be dripping. It is a longer story about the water pipes in this house. We can come back to that later. The cups are up in the cupboard on the left. Careful with the yellow cup! The handle is very fragile. It's actually best if you don't touch the handle. It is actually best if you use a different cup. Thanks. Take the blue cup instead. The one that looks homemade. Do you remember that one?

When you've made a cup of coffee, you can, for example, sit down in the living room. We use it as both a living room and a bedroom. It's easy to turn the bed into a sofa. You just have to take the foam mattress you see behind the bed and pull it up a little and then push the bed in so that it presses against the foam mattress and holds it firmly against the wall. And voila! You have a lovely sofa where you can really stretch your legs. If you feel like leaning back, just be very careful not to lean against the curtains. They can fall down very easily. In general, avoid touching the curtains in the living room, especially those behind the bed/sofa. We're are not sure about what happened to the original curtain rods. There are some holes up there above the window where those who lived here before had drilled some screws into some soft material in the wall. Of course, that couldn't hold a curtain up. Now we have hung the curtains with some drawing pins instead. As you can see they are drawn now and it has become a bit difficult to pull them apart if, for example, you want some daylight into the living room. If you consider that daylight is very necessary, it is important that you first push all the furniture a little away from the wall before you start touching the curtains. Then you can take them - very carefully! - one at a time and roll them diagonally to the side. But you must not pull them! As soon as you feel resistance, you should let go and start over. Maybe it is actually better that you do not try. We really hope that is okay with you. The problem is that if they fall down, they will probably never come back up. It has never bothered us that the curtains were drawn - we actually think it is a bit cosy. We know you'll probably prefer the light. You've always been that way. But you'll get used to it, you'll see.

While you are sitting there in the bed which is now a sofa with your cup of coffee in the blue mug and not the yellow one and leaning back but without touching the curtains you can really relax and recover. If you look a little to the right you might notice a black mold stain on the wall. We have left a bucket of paint in the shed so you can paint it over. We painted the wall just before you came, but in the last couple of years the mold has started to penetrate the new layers of paint faster and faster, and we almost have to paint the wall once a week. We don't know exactly why it appeared. It was just there one day. It's probably related to the old water damage in the basement. Now that I think about it, maybe you will actually be interested in looking at the mold. I can imagine that you might want to study its development and see what stains and patterns it makes. Maybe you will think that it is like a cave painting that emerges on the wall and tells a story about those who came before us and those who will come after. I can imagine you would think something poetic like that. It wasn't for us. We weren't interested in dwelling on a time that isn't now. We were busy making the house functional for you, improving it, so we didn't have the time and energy to sit there and analyse past traumas. But I know you're different and now that we've already renovated the house for you, you have plenty of time to enjoy those cave paintings. In any case, if it was still up to us we would paint it over about once a week.

It's an old house, so of course there are all sorts of little problems that need to be kept in check and renovated on an ongoing basis. Half of the roof fell in that night 5 years ago when there was such a violent storm. You probably remember that storm? It was called Gorm or Bodil or something like that. That's probably where one of the gables collapsed too. And then of course there was that flood many years ago now. Was it in the mid-90s? It was a water pipe that had burst in the basement. Water was gushing out for months before it was discovered and therefore caused quite a lot of damage. That's also where the problems with the water supply came from. But maybe you can manage without water like we have? The flood revealed that there was something not quite right in the very foundation of the house. Something that had been there since it was built, but now that the water had been soaking the entire basement and penetrated all the cracks and crevices, it became evident that something was completely wrong. It was probably also a problem for the previous residents, even though they never said anything about it. We haven't quite gotten to that part yet, the part about repairing the foundation. And we have to say that on a daily basis things are going well enough, so we don't really think there's any rush to get that project started. Time will move forward regardless of whether there are cracks in the foundation or not. You may disagree, but you must understand that it was different for us. We were afraid. We did not have your courage to look at the cracks and see how they reflect the patterns in our wrinkled faces. The wrinkled faces we have turned towards you with a comforting smile again and again. Faces that have been the maps we have used to show you the way in the world. Forgive us for our cowardice. If you just don't go down to the basement, you might even forget that the flood was anything at all.

We really hope you like being here! Of course you don't have to pay anything. It's our gift to you. You only have to cover the utility bills yourself. And then you have to be careful to talk to the electricity company, the heating company, the water company and the internet and telephone provider and get it changed so that it's all in your name. That's very important. Otherwise it will be a mess later on. When we took over the house, the people who lived here before us didn't say anything about all this and suddenly we hadn't paid the bills for a year and we had neither water nor heat. Yes, the people who lived here before  weren't very decent people. You should have seen the garden when we moved in! It was terribly overgrown. Not at all like it is now. We have put a lot of work into this house; it has been important to us that it was good and ready for you so that you could have a better life than the one we had. We have done everything we could and everything we have done we have done out of love. We hope you have many good years here. We love you.

Kind regards

Mom and Dad