Heaven Diary

9/04/2003

Today I stopped by a cabin belonging to someone named Yoru. Yoru wasn't there yet, but the place was ready for him, or her, whichever it was. I took a walk through the place and it had high ceilings, the most fantastic art you've ever seen hanging on every wall, a thick, soft carpet, and a huge bathtub.

I saw a molecular transporter near the fireplace, so I pushed the button and stepped in to see where it went. I ended up in another house. A picture on the wall showed a picture of a smiling guy with a mustache, and the plaque below said Craig A. Loewen.

It was an old 2-story brick farmhouse, in the style of houses made between 1890-1905 in south central Pennsylvania or Vermont, with walls as much as a yard thick, windows five feet high with sills that you could sit in.
It had two or four large fireplaces with a broad double-landing stair to the second floor, and the attic could almost be considered a third floor. The furnishings were simple, comfortable, natural.
The immediate sense I felt when I saw it was that I wasn't in a house, but in a home. A home where people have lived and loved and passed on, not in tragedy, but as a natural completion of their lives, and secondly, because the house had been a home, its walls have absorbed enough humanity from those that lived in it. It had a friendly and loving personality all its own.
That's the exact impression I got, and that's exactly what the planning book said on the coffee table. Outside the window, it was like that scene from Star Trek: Generations, where it's somebody's farm home or something like that, a rustic place with lots of trees and wooded areas and horses in it.

I found a unicorn standing outside the front door. On earth, unicorns used to be a symbol of the occult, and supposedly only virgins could ride them, but we are like angels now, and we're in heaven, so those issues no longer apply. The unicorn was merely a white horse with a horn on its head, and when I got on it, it ran really fast.

I left the place with the late 1800's house and arrived at a nice, huge, modern looking two story house with a tower and a horse pasture out front. I could see a city in the distance, but it was definitely secluded. There had to be at least ten acres of beautiful landscaping, including topiary animals, around it, maybe twenty, except for the places where the horses were grazing, which was a large portion of the plot. At least ten big horses and small ponies stood out grazing a few yards from a barn and an olympic size swimming pool.
The door on the house was unlocked, since it was heaven, so I went in. The place was huge! The first thing I noticed were the really huge cathedral ceilings. They went up twelve feet with skylights at the top. Really tall and shaped like an upside down "V," made of the same material as the house. There was even a balcony overlooking the living room and the fireplace.
I walked around and found a door leading to a nice, clean, concrete basement (which incidentally had passages leading to an indoor swimming pool), and another door leading to what can only be described as an industrial kitchen. I think the maximum occupancy load of that room had to be somewhere in the hundreds. Even the thought of bumping into someone in that room seemed ridiculous, unless you did it on purpose. Another door next to the living room led to a two car garage with the fanciest looking cars I've ever seen in them.
Out back behind the building was a patio of a modest size, looking like a great place for kids to play around.
There were restrooms in the house, too, even though in heaven we don't need to use them. There was one on the main floor, next to the guest bedroom down the hallway from the kitchen, and one on the second floor. The second floor bathroom was a lot nicer than the first floor one. In fact, instead of having a bath, it had a super wide jacuzzi. In the back of my mind were thoughts about how nice this would be for an overweight person, but I immediately dismissed that as ridiculous because nobody has weight problems in heaven unless they have always dreamed about being a sumo wrestler. The bathroom also had a separate shower stall and two separate sinks. A framed picture showed a married couple, but marriage doesn't exist here in heaven, so it's just for memory's sake.
Every room upstairs had a ceiling, by the way, even though they were all under the cathedral ceiling. I went into the room next to the bathroom and saw a big room full of artwork. It was full of posters and framed pictures with drawings and other works of art scattered all over the place. A large drawing table sat in the middle of the room, covered with papers, art supplies and My Little Ponies of various shapes and sizes. And on the wall was this picture with a gold frame around it:

Next door to that was a library, filled with every imaginable type of book you could ever want to read. This appeared to be dedicated to the husband in the picture. The other three rooms up there were bedrooms. Two were childrens rooms, the other one was a master bedroom. And there were stairs leading to the tower. It turned out that the tower held an observatory where you could see the stars and everything in the night sky. The telescope was excellent. You could see ice crystals on Titan with it.