I measure houses. I see the full spectrum from the good to the bad and the ugly.
I see lavish, pristine showcases, derelict hovels and pretty much everything in between.
But what strikes me more than anything else has to be the way the places feel.
There's the meticulously styled nouveau-decor environment that feels as if you've been sucked into the photo shoot spread. It's beautifully rendered, it's painstakingly arranged yet it's spiritless and sterile.
These are houses (not homes) that haven't yet soaked up any real family energy or assumed an aura of having interfaced with haphazardly emotional beings of all ages and persuasions.
The ones that have been lived in feel entirely different regardless of the decor. Some emanate warmth and whisper silently of long, blissful summers past when visiting family and friends clattered through the halls and blasted the walls with their laughter.
Others are unspeakably melancholy. I seek only to do my work in those and move on before I feel the sorrow reach out and touch me.
That isn't to say every deceased estate is a maudlin, tragic mausoleum of fragile, broken memories, no. Many of them still harbour rows of family portraiture, chronicles of flourishing children, burgeoning into maturity, seeding new life, sharing joyous milestones. They emanate a nurturing tranquility these homes.
Yet some are just too despairing for words. One recently - room upon room of multiple lifetimes hurriedly crammed into boxes and garbage bags, no consideration given to what such trinkets or memorabilia might once have meant. The flotsam may as well have perished with the owner...
Wherever there have been animals, I can feel the difference. There's usually some sympathetic resonance within the walls.
And often people just want to share a moment of something with someone simply because they're there and will listen.
We should never stop listening and we should take the time to hear.
And what you imprint upon your walls shall speak softly to the world long after you depart this realm.
We are never far from the people and places we've touched.
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