Across the drive from my dad’s house sits an old, dilapidated 2-bed, 1-bath house constructed before that moniker was used to describe homes. Its history — and I know it has one because it sits on the home place of the farm that has been in my family for four generations — has been lost to time. It’s missing part of the roof and half of its floors, and in all reality, it really needs to be the next training exercise for the local volunteer fire department.

But I walked through it the other day, as much as I dared, and couldn’t help but wonder what stories the walls of that house held.  What triumphs and what sorrows they witnessed. What secrets they will take to their inevitable end.

I wondered if they remember me as a kid when I learned to ride my bike back and forth in the drive. Or that time I abandoned the mower by the door because instead of keeping their secrets buried, the exterior walls were harboring bees instead. Or that other time when the mower brakes failed and I nearly broke myself in half running under an anhydrous tank parked in the yard.

Maybe. Maybe not. They’ll never tell.

Time is a fickle thing, you know. We mortals try to wrestle it into submission, arbitrarily manipulating our clocks twice a year just to prove we won’t be cowed by its methodical advancement. Yet no one save God himself has ever managed to slow it down or put it on hold.

Most of you know we recently moved back to my hometown. We made the move for several reasons, but one of them was so that our kids could grow up literally over the pond dam and through the field from their last remaining grandparent, my dad.

Dad will turn 70 next year, so this concept of time has been on my mind a lot. In seven decades, he’s raised five kids, worried about each of us in alternating turns — some of us more than others — buried my mom and both of his parents, and at times lived on little more than faith and the promise of rain.

My boys will often ask me to snuggle with them at bedtime, scootching over to give me both a piece of their bed and a portion of their blanket as part of the deal. And I almost always oblige, because I know one day, they will ask for the last time. One day, they will outgrow their need for me. It is time’s ultimate betrayal.

I want to remember these days, make them long and slow, to drink in the memories of my kids’ small hands holding mine before they reach for someone else to hold. Most of all, I want  to give the walls of this home sweet, tender secrets to keep.