The Someday House

Someday I will have a house, a rambling, Victorian house, with back staircases and tall windows and a decrepit dumbwaiter, like one of those that has a flag flying over it on embassy row. It will be in the middle of the city, so there might not be a garden, but there will be little balconies overflowing with green things, and a sun room with potted palms and rocking chairs. And I will fill the house with strangers, every room. They will be foreign students, professors on sabbatical, missionaries waiting to deploy, an old woman whose basement has flooded. They will be people "in between," people who need a place to be loved and cared for a while. We will put in an industrial-sized clotheswasher and a kitchen that would make Julia Childs weep for joy. We will eat together in a big dining room, and afterwards we will tell stories and sing songs and read books. It won't cost hardly anything to live there, because it will be the ministry of a church, a church's way of extending hospitality (either that, or I will have become a famous author, and we will all live off the royalties ;)

That is what I dream.