Are You Afraid of the Dark?

I am. I always have been and I guess I always will be. Last Friday night is just another example of how silly my fear really is. Before you read this, prepare yourself. You may never be able to take the Bricks seriously again.

So here's what happened...

Matt and I had both had busy and exhausting weeks, so we decided to change up our regularly scheduled Friday Date Night and have a date night in. I guess I really didn't realize how tired we were until Matt fell asleep at 7:30 while we were watching a movie. After I finished watching the movie, I got ready for bed around 9:00, very much looking forward to a good night's sleep. But that isn't exactly what happened.

At approximately 3:00am I was awakened by the sound of footsteps in my apartment. You can only imagine how terrifying it must be to wake to hear footsteps INSIDE your apartment when both you and your husband are in the bed. I listened for a few minutes (seconds) and punched Matt in the arm and whispered for him to listen. He clearly heard the footsteps, too, because his body tensed up next to me. At this moment, we were both pretty sure some scary man was going to come back to our bedroom and shoot us in the head. That didn't happen, but we still felt the presence of a person in our apartment.

Before I continue with the story I should give you an idea of how our apartment is laid out. It is a typical New Orleans shotgun, which means that you enter into the living room and all other rooms are setup so that you could walk a straight line (or shoot a shotgun) from the front to the back of the apartment. So, in our place. The front room is the living room, followed by the kitchen/dining area, then our bedroom and bathroom in the very back. It is also important to note that our front door is the only door we have. Now on with my terrifying tale...

So, it's 3:00am, we're awake and sure that some creepy character is in our home. What did we do? Well, Matt leapt across the bed to close the bedroom door (because that is very likely to stop a murderous intruder). Then, we went on a search for a weapon. I'm not a big gun person, so we don't own one, and all we came up with was a shovel from our back closet. Not the greatest option, but it was our only tool.

At this point, we continued to hear noises, and though we realized by now it was probably not a person, a recent news story about coyotes in New Orleans had me pretty convinced that we had a wild animal in our house. I was too scared to let Matt go through the two front rooms of the house with only a shovel to fight a ravaging coyote, and I definitely wasn't going to go, so we decided to escape the house...through the bathroom window. So we climbed out and creeped around the side, through the underbrush, past our grill and bicycles. It seemed odd that the front door was still locked when we approached the front of the house. I wasn't sure how a wild coyote could have gotten in, but I knew he was in there alright. So, we got Matt's hide-a-key and sat in his car. For an hour. I am not making this up.

We were trying to figure out what to do. Should we call the 2nd District Police Station (and what would we tell them)? Should we call our friend and neighbor Mary and crash at her place until daylight? Should we call our friend Jeremy to come and fight this beast with Matt? I was pretty disappointed that we couldn't call the Ghostbusters. I'm sure they would have known what to do.

At one point Matt even went back to the side of the house and peered into the window. He came back and reported that it was definitely not a burglar because both of our laptops were still out. Moreover, it didn't feel like anything else had been moved. Our kitchen chairs were in the same position as they were at bedtime, and our garbage can hadn't been turned over. Still, I wasn't willing to go back in, or to let Matt go in alone, because if there was something there, he wouldn't have a clear and easy exit.

Finally, about 4:30, feeling braver, I relented and agreed that we could reenter our house. We had to climb back through the bathroom window because all of our keys were in the living room by the front door. So, we crept back along the side of our house and climbed back through the window. I was still pretty much terrified, but Matt I think had caught on and insisted that he at least open the door and leap for the kitchen light. I agreed, reluctantly.

So, bravely, Matt opened the bedroom door (shovel in hand) and jumped into the kitchen. He flipped on the light switch and we saw it.....

NOTHING. We saw nothing. Want to know why? Because there was nothing there! No burglar. No coyote. Nothing. I was relieved, obviously, and in shock. I knew I heard something - someone - walking on my wood floors. What could it have been? Maybe we had rodents in our walls...but this sounded much heavier than a rat or even a raccoon.

As I said, it was 4:30 and we were again exhausted. Matt went back to sleep pretty quickly, but it took a while for my heart to stop pounding enough for me to fall asleep. When sleep finally did come, it didn't seem to last long enough. I got up early and went to meet some friends. While I was gone, Matt called me. He had solved the mystery!!

Y'all will never believe what the terrifying sound was. A person. Walking on wood floors. Next door. Our landlord, who was out of town last weekend, had a houseguest who we didn't know about and the second bedroom in that apartment is right above our bedroom. I wasn't completely crazy, you see. I did hear something. It just wasn't what I thought it was.

Moral(s) of the story:

1. Don't believe everything you hear. Sometimes your mind can play tricks on you. Especially at 3:00 in the morning when you've had a long week and are exhausted.

2. Don't take yourself too seriously. It's been fun to share this story with friends and family this week (and now with the world wide web) and share a laugh at my own expense. I forget to do that too often.

Open House

Growing up in the South, you learn a lot about hospitality from a young age. My mom and Nan kept the house picked, partly because they liked to and partly because “you never know when company might stop by”. My parents’ house has been the center of many birthday parties, fancy dinners, and family celebrations and it was first from my family that I came to understand the concept of being hospitable, or opening up your home to others. As a child I thought of hospitality mostly as being good at keeping a clean home and having lots of snacks available for guests. Over the years, I have continued to develop my understanding of what it means to be hospitable.

Recently the idea of hospitality has been on my mind because living in community or 'doing life' with others is very important to Matt and I. One of the most important things to us when looking for an apartment last year was that it have a good size living room and room for a kitchen table because we wanted to be able to host people for dinner or share conversation on the couch.

We’ve met some great people who have shown us true hospitality. My friend Melanie is an excellent example. We met her family about a year ago. Not long after we met, Melanie and her husband invited us over for dinner. We were nervous and wanted to make sure to put on our Sunday best (as good Southern kids learn to do when going to somebody’s house for the first time). When they opened the door for us, Matt and I couldn’t help but smile. Walking into our friends’ living room for the first time felt warm and comforting to us; it reminded us of home. It’s not that our friends’ décor was similar to our parents’ (in fact it is quite different) but their home felt lived in. I don’t mean to say that Melanie is not a great housekeeper (she is), but it was SO refreshing to see that she hadn’t spent all of her time that day straightening every little thing. Instead, it looked like she had played with her boys (I remember a board game being out) and prepared for dinner (dishes still in the sink) with new friends. It made us feel much more relaxed and like we could be ourselves. The fact that their home didn’t feel like a museum allowed us to let our guard down and to just enjoy the evening getting to know new friends.

This past weekend, Matt and I were privileged to host a very good friend of mine for the a few days. To be honest, we meant to spend all of Friday cleaning the house and preparing for her arrival, but, life happened. Stuff came up. We had to run errands. We had some important conversations with each other that required us sitting and talking face to face (not running around discussing from different rooms while frantically cleaning). So, needless to say, a few cleaning chores didn’t get done. We picked up most of our junk and I did at least vacuum and clean the bathroom, but it was not our best work. As we headed to the airport to pick up my friend, I was a little nervous, hoping maybe in the nighttime lighting she might not notice (at least at first) that I hadn’t dusted the bookshelf or mopped the floors. But to my surprise, once we picked her up and got back to the apartment, I didn’t think twice about how clean or not clean things were. I was just excited to have a few days to share with my friend. Over the weekend, we shared memories and laughs, encouraged each other about our futures, and mostly just enjoyed being in the same space. It was a beautiful thing. And it didn’t matter that I hadn’t mopped the floors! I’m not sure if she even noticed, or if she noticed, if she even cared.

From all of that, what I’m learning is this: hospitality is more than opening our homes to people, it involves opening our lives and letting each other in. Even if they see our dirty floors. Even if they see our sin. Because the beauty of hospitality is not measured by the level of our decoration or the cleanliness of our home; instead, it is measured by the memories that are made there, the lives that are changed.

I read a book a couple of years ago by Lauren Winner called Mudhouse Sabbath. In it, she discusses this concept of hospitality, noting "Having guests and visitors, if we do it right, is not an imposition, because we are not meant to rearrange our lives for our guests - we are meant to invite our guests to enter into our lives as they are. It is this forging of relationships that transforms entertaining into hospitality."

So, if you find yourself at the Brick House for dinner or a chat anytime soon, please don’t judge if everything doesn’t look just perfect. We’re trying to spend the minutes before guests arrive praying for our time together rather than scrubbing our floors.