I set my scraper down real slow, because the newest lines on that plaster, the ones in fresh ink that had not yellowed, were a goodbye, and they were signed.
Under the wallpaper of that small bedroom was the whole history of a family, written on the wall across three generations, and the last lines had been added by the last of them before she sold the house.
It started the way the widow who hired me expected, the way folks have always marked a wall before they paper over it. A name. A wedding date, 1961. Then childrens heights, penciled year by year, little dashes climbing the plaster with a name and an age beside each. Ordinary. Sweet.
But it kept going, because somewhere along the way that wall stopped being a record and became a place to say things. A mother wrote that she was frightened the year money was short, and that she prayed at this wall, and that they made it through. A father wrote, years on, that he was proud of a son who had gone off to the service. The heights kept climbing. The family kept confessing itself to the plaster and papering gently over the words, trusting the house to keep them.
The last lines were the freshest, a different pen, no yellow to them at all. They were written by the woman who had grown up in that room, come back an old woman to sell the house her parents built, standing alone in the smallest bedroom one final time.
She had written, I was the little girl at the bottom of this wall. Mama, Daddy, I read all of you today. I am old now, older than you ever got to be, and I am selling our house because it is time. Whoever finds these words, we were happy here. Please be happy here too. And then her name, and the date, only a few weeks back.
Thirty years with a scraper, and I have peeled a lot of walls. I never peeled one that talked back.
I did not paint over it. I could not. I called the widow who hired me down to the room and read it to her, all of it, three generations of a family that had loved this house before she ever saw it.
She decided to keep the wall. We built a little frame around a section of it, glass over the plaster, so the words stay. The rest we painted, gentle, and she says the room feels warm now in a way she cannot explain.
I can explain it. A whole family is still in there, telling the new one it is going to be all right.