"If These Walls Could Talk"

I found the book I was in the mood for the other day, a book steeped in home and habitat. It's "If These Walls Could Talk, Thoughts of Home" a book of essays by a variety of different writers (none of whom I've heard of, gulp, but many of whom I'll now look up for more of their published works). This book has sat on my bedside table for awhile, and so I took it with me to Idaho this weekend, to finally finish.

My husband and I stayed at the Enders Hotel in Soda Springs, Idaho, and fell in love. No, not with each other lol, with the hotel. It's 19th century restored, with rich dark woodwork, furnished with antiques, quilts on the beds, tapestries on the walls. Original artwork and large, framed portraits of family ancestors grace the hallways. You're steeped in history just walking to your room. Ours was on the third floor, at the end of the hallway, as secluded and quiet as a couple of over-stressed suburbanites wanting a retreat could ever want.

Outside the window of our room, a geyser shot high into the air every hour on the hour for five minutes. After it finished, birds came to drink from the pools around the rocks. The most picturesque freight trains you ever saw, with box cars in bright primary colors, tooted their way past the hotel almost as often as the geyser spouted.

In this environment, I read from my book of essays on home. Oh, and did I say that on the main floor of this hotel was a kitchen like a family dining room, with delicious, large meals for unbelievably cheap prices? We loved this hotel, and our own third floor room, so much that we hardly wanted to leave it. We read, we talked, we worked on the business plans of two family businesses. We happily cocooned there for two full days, and promised each other to return soon. It's only three hours from our Utah home, but it feels like another world, or another century.

We decided that if we ever get really, really rich, we will buy this hotel and live on the third floor.