Force Vitale

My architect friend, who designed a post war modernist house for the pianist and me in 1970, phoned yesterday to tell me it was featured in a 3 month Legacy Show in Lotus City! It, amongst some other buildings, broke new ground at the time in the seventies, and for me the house was ground breaking, though in retrospect, I was an arriviste then and thought I needed such a vehicle.We sold the house after seventeen years of living as our family grew up and we simplified with an apartment in town and a cottage on Lotus Island.I never forgot the house through the intervening years as it was for me a crowning jewel throughout the time we lived there! When we left and the furnishings were gone I never returned to see it because it would have been painful. The pianist however went back to look at the empty house and as she looked in every room she knew: "A house without a force vitale; is only a beautiful empty shell." Time has healed desire for me now and I am looking forward to the Legacy Show. I hope I have conquered my arriviste tendencies. The heart of any house, beautiful or homely, is what creates the home. The pianist shared my feelings about leaving it, but it became apparent to her as she toured the empty house that it was a corpse, albeit a beautiful corpse, without a heart, awaiting a new transplant. I wish now that I had the pianist's foresight to revisit it once it was empty so that I could also write finis to the sense of loss that I felt at that time.