Northeast Corner

Second floor,
where light arrives first.

The midwife chose it for the breeze,
the quiet.
Here, three generations enter breathing.
Margaret, then her daughter, that daughter’s son.

The room learns the rhythm.

Pacing, pausing, panting, push.
Stains never quite gone from pine boards.
Notches carved in the doorframe,
counting contractions, minutes, heartbeats,
breaths between one world and the next.

Years turn.
Mr. Vaughn brings his piano up the narrow stairs.
Four men cursing,
wall gouged where they turned too sharp.
But worth it.
Northeast light falling across sheet music.

Students climb those stairs Tuesday afternoons.
Small fingers finding middle C,
the metronome marking time.
The room vibrates with scales,
mistakes repeated until right.

In the floorboards,
under the piano’s weight,
old stains rest
like notation no one reads.

More years.
Boxes stacked to ceiling.
“Kitchen,”
“Mom’s China,”
“Misc.”
in failing marker.
The Johnsons meant it briefly,
this storage.
Time had other plans.

Paths worn
between Christmas decorations
and tax returns.
Sometimes they hear piano music.
Just the house settling, they tell each other.

The room waits.
Storage is also a kind of holding.
Under boxes, those old stains
patient as geology.
The doorframe notches
measure only dust.

Amanda paints it yellow,
not knowing her great-grandmother
chose the same shade.
Crib where the piano was,
where the birthing bed was.

Different births now.
Midnight feedings, soft songs,
the rhythm of rocking.
The room knows this lullaby,
carries it in the walls.

The notches watch another generation begin.

Empty again.
Emma and David strip it bare.
Just cushions, singing bowls, morning light.
They came for the quiet corner,
same reasons everyone chooses this room.

During renovations, they find layers.
Yellow paint, green paint,
wallpaper with roses.
Under the carpet,
those stains.

They sand and seal
but keep the doorframe with its notches.
Character, they say.

In morning meditation,
the room breathes with them.
It has held birth, music, waiting, birth again,
now this chosen emptiness.

The space between uses,
like rest between notes,
making the music possible.

A room is architecture
pretending to be neutral.
But spaces hold their stories
the way hands hold memory.

In corners where dust gathers,
in floorboards that creak just so,
in how light falls through the day.

Between each use, the room stood empty.
These intervals when it held only potential.
Not birthing room or music room,
or storage or nursery or temple,
but space
that allows any story to inhabit it.

The northeast corner still catches morning first.
The breeze still flows when windows open.
The notches still mark the doorframe,
counting something new for each generation.
Births, beats, breaths, becoming.

What the room knows.
Every use it has been,
every use it might yet be.