Texts for Translation:
  Rebecca Jan Lane

I sit at the kitchen table of a house built in the 1930's. Built by a young man and his younger red haired wife. The young man, who hated school and loved the forests and the farms, married the young red haired woman, who loved to read and had thick coke bottle glasses since the time she was five. Her name was Esther, his name was Matthew. He proposed one evening, as twilight was coming over top the mountains, on a hill overlooking a grassy pasture. The young red haired woman looked through her glasses, perhaps at the field below them, or above the ancient mountains that had long since started to put themselves to bed, to another day and a white haired grandmother whose smile she recognized. The young woman bowed her head and shyly agreed. On one condition that they never squabble.
They were married. The young man bought a nice suit, black with grey pinstripes. A scarlet rose was pinned into his lapel, plucked from his mother's garden trellis. The red haired woman made her dress at a sewing circle the week before, and held in her hands a bouquet of smiling faced daisies and orange throated lilies. The preacher preached, the guests smiled and cried. And by the time it was over, the two were joined for the days of their lives.
The young man built her a house - by this time she was rubbing her rounding belly - out of all that he had: a hen house and a cattle barn. She planted the roses bushes; it was all that her mother could give for her daughter's wedding. He brought the animals - the horses, the sheep, chickens and a four liver spotted holsteins. That autumn, the baby was born, a squalling wide lunged girl. She had her mother's hair and her father's nose. That spring, the baby was buried, having slept the night through and not woken up. Her mother wept, and her father silently planted baby's breath around the rose bushes.
Can a house be dead? Somehow absorb emotions and replay them, back into the hollows of the rooms? And when those emotions stop existing, does its lowly die, settle into itself, into the rafters, into the dirt beneath it? Or rather is it like an echo - just waiting for those sounds it once knew and repeated for so long, that the house sleeps, hibernates, comatose, until someone whispers in its ear and wakes it from long dreamless slumber?
And now as I sit here at this kitchen table selected by someone else for another person's vision, I wonder if the house has roused yet?
The yellow rose bush that the young bride brought from her homestead, the lilies, the orchards where the horses hid, all still remain. They, like most other things, have simply existed, only survived.
She left the light on, the day after she died. The young bride with red hair, forty nine years later, after her hair had fallen out from radiation and chemo, slipped into that eternal slumber the poets speak of. The young husband, now also forty nine years older, his hands gnarled from working the farm, came to his house, and turned out the light that she'd kept at her bedside, though he did not remember it being left on. Hours later, in his pyjamas, searching for the tissues, he found the light on. Electric candle bulbs illuminated the pink glass shades. Tired, he turned it off again. Then in front of his hazy eyes, it clicked itself back on.
"Well," he supposed, "if she wants it on, I'll leave it on."
The pink lamp burned in the darkness for three days; a silent presence of she who'd gone ahead. Two years later, the young husband, older than before, went to meet his bride in time for a Christmas waltz.
And then the house lay empty and hollow. Until another young husband who brought roses and flower seeds, and another young red haired wife who carried books, came to live there. To breathe life into each other and into the disappointed house.
As I go tonight, and plan the gardens and perhaps our family, I feel another set of eyes looking upon me. The house makes sounds that it hasn't made, and I only can assume it is slowly rousing. And last night, upon dressing for my bed, a light turned on and burned brightly before my eyes, illuminating the dark from behind pink glass shades.

Rebecca Jan Lane, Profesor of English

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