The Houses

Do you realize when you stand on his front porch, you're standing where Mark Twain once stood? When you step around the table you're taking the same steps he took, animatedly telling stories to his guests. Dragging your hand along the railing up the stairs in the same path his hand once dragged. This bed was the very bed in which he wrote his autobiography. I could see him leaning over his billiards table, cigar in mouth (he smoked 20 a day!), the very billiards table he leaned against up to 8 hours a day. I could see him sitting at his desk in the corner, away from the windows so he wouldn't get distracted as he wrote. To think that I was looking at the very desk where characters like Tom Sawyer came to his mind made me wonder if perhaps some of his imaginative genius was still floating around above his pool table. I wonder if simply by being in the same room where he imagined, some of his genius could leak in through my ears and eyes, so that I would walk away thinking a little more like Mark Twain.

I stood next to the very desk where Louisa May Alcott penned Little Women. I lightly rested my fingertips on the desk, realizing that her fingertips rested on this desk. I looked out the windows on either side, wondering what she saw instead of the paved road and line of parked cars. As people began filing out of the room, I looked over and saw a picture of Louisa at her desk, writing. I realized I was standing in the exact spot where she was sitting, in front of the same bookshelf that was there in 1868. To be standing exactly where she sat in that picture sucked all of the air out of me. The heart that flowed through a pen to create such beautiful words was beating where my heart was beating. Wow, how cheesy does that sound?
Walking through the rest of the house was like dodging ghosts. Between these walls that I now stood echoed the voices of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Standing in the room where Louisa's oldest sister was married, I felt as though I was spying on their happy and solemn ceremony. I could feel the tearful joy they must have felt at such an occasion! I must sound insanely superstitious, or at least a tad too imaginative. Perhaps it's that part of Mark Twain's brain that came in through my ears.