Smudged finger prints

I have been working hard on this old house of mine, hopefully doing all the right things so that at some point the house will attract the right folks at the right time with the right amount of cash to blow. When these projects started back in July I thought, okay, cool, the house is sweet and quaint and all that, that in itself should attract buyers. But the more projects I have managed to knock out the more I found left to do. Today was one of those days. Once I moved all of The Boy's stuff out of his room and into the staging area next door I saw that the room was a bit tawdry, a tad more than worn. So yesterday I got out the brushes and the paint cans and got to work. Just finished up this afternoon. Sunshiney yellow with white trim. When it dries I'll shift around a few pieces of furniture just to give it that staged, lived in look.

The only thing that gave me pause was the door. I was working my way around the room and finally had everything done but the doorway leading out of the room. The frame was easy to knock out, then I started in on the door itself. That's when I saw them, the hand prints down below the doorknob. Somehow in my frenzy to clean I missed them, that or I ignored them, but there they were, in stark relief to the bright, white paint all around them. I looked at the positions and the size of the prints and knew them to be the "pawprints" of my youngest and my girl, Punkin, too. Nobody else three years ago would have been that far down, that close to the floor.

So, in order to move the project along I just painted over them. I didn't wipe them away like a good prep artist should, but instead covered them up in order to preserve them. Nobody else will ever know that they are there, no one will ever be able to discover their presence. But when I look at that door, at that place below the door knob, I will know that my children were here. This was their house, too. This was a family place.

Walking out of that freshly painted room I can say that a family lived here. Mine.

Salud!