Bless This House

Welcome to our home. This is what you see when you enter in through the front door: stairs leading up to our converted attic space/now theater room, a chair holding a pillow proclaiming that "a spoiled rotten dachshund lives here" and a Singer treadle base with a glass top serving as an entrance hall table. Oh, yes, and on the wall directly in front of you is a wool applique wallhanging  beside a framed, embroidered sampler. The sampler was added today, I stitched it in 1975 and presented it to my then brand-new mother and father-in-law that year for Christmas.  They were building their home at that time and this sampler was proudly placed in their foyer a few months later when they moved in; there it hung, proudly, until a few weeks ago. With a heavy heart I took it down from the nail that supported it, dusted it off and carried it here. Yesterday their house went on the market for sale. I pray that special home will find a family soon, it needs one. This hand embroidered house blessing will hang in our home from now on. Every day when I walk past it I will remember, and my heart will smile. I pray that our own front door will "prove ever open to joy and love" as theirs did, for four-plus decades.

This cross stitch sampler was ordered, if memory serves, from an advertisement in the back of Good Housekeeping magazine. It was a kit, the linen was stamped and the floss was included. This blessing was inspired by a plaque that hung in the White House during the Eisenhower administration; the sentiment, however, is timeless.

Life is Good!