Houses of Your Mind

I lay in bed this morning, unable to return to sleep after awakening with a full bladder and going to the bathroom. Like everyone else during times like this, once back in bed my mind began scanning data lodged for decades in my brain, dredging up memories and replaying what seemed like megabytes of useless information.

Mostly, during times like these, I want to locate a key in my brain and turn it off, at least for a few hours. This morning, it was not to be and proved somehow different. While raking through the trash piles of my brain, I discovered something that blew me away. I want say remembered, because this snippet of information is something that I have always inherently known, but have never put together in a logical thought process. What did I discover? Well, this may not sound so unusual to you fair readers out there, but the more I think of it, the stranger it seems to me.

For whatever reason, I was thinking about my grandparents. My dad’s mother, Dale and her husband Oscar lived on a farm outside of Atlanta in east Texas. My mom’s mother, Lela and her husband Jim lived about a mile from us in Vivian, Louisiana. As random thoughts raced through my brain like water through an empty pipe, I gradually became aware of an apparent truth that had somehow escaped me my entire life.

The houses of both my grandparents were identical. They were exactly the same size and all the specific rooms – bathroom, kitchen, bedrooms, dining room, and living room – occupied exactly the same place. They even had the same directional orientation.

Strange, I grant you, but not beyond the realm of simple coincidence considering they were all built about the same time, and not more than fifty miles from one another. Then it dawned on me. The house were I grew up was the same as my grandparents, right down to each individual room. The only difference was the directional orientation. My house was situated perpendicular to that of my grandparent’s.

Wide-awake at four in the morning, I began trying to remember my neighbor’s houses and those of my friends. My friend Clay’s house, I realized, was exactly like mine except it was oriented differently. I could not quite remember the interior of Rod, Wiley, Elwin and Tim’s houses although I think they were different.

What in the hell does all this mean? I admit the thought worried me at four in the morning. After ruminating on the matter all day long, I can conclude only one of three things. 1) Some builder knocked out copies of the same house, and managed to market his product over many miles. 2) We are random although somehow ordered creations in the mind of some stellar being, or 3) there is some sort of chaotic yet orderly recipe for the world, as we know it.

My logic tells me that the first explanation is correct, but I wonder – do we have the vaguest clue as to who we really are, or even loosely realize what motivations or earth-shattering processes control our destinies?

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