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Houses have their secrets.

Years of sheltering the busy and cluttered lives of the men, women and children who occupy them leave their mark with odds and ends tucked into unexpected places.

When I was a child, I lived with my grandparents in the house where my mother had grown up. For several years, she didn’t live there with us.

While there were a few tangible reminders of her – photos on the wall and dolls in a case in the bedroom, for example – it never occurred to me to visualize her there as a child, as someone who had ever been my own age.

Then, one day, playing in the backyard, I moved a heavy planter to make room for my bicycle. Half buried in the dirt beneath the mossy concrete urn was a tiny cup, part of a child’s tea service. I was delighted with my find and ran to show my grandmother, who was standing at the sink in the kitchen. She dried her hands and bent to examine my treasure.

It was, she told me, part of the tea set my mother had played with when she was a child.

It was my mother’s.

For the first time, I connected the place where I lived to my mother’s childhood. I was able to imagine her playing, pouring ice water “tea” for her dolls, in the cool green grass shaded by the leaves of the giant hackberry tree whose branches spread over the backyard.

I realized then that my house – my mother’s house – was a place that had surprises hidden in the corners.

Over the years, before she returned and lived there with us, I found other things that might have been hers. There was a small workbench in the basement, next to my grandfather’s work space, the perfect size for a little girl.

Marbles, a tiny doll shoe and pennies that might have fallen from her pocket, appeared in the soil after a heavy rain.

Then, one day she was back.

Standing with me in the backyard, she pointed up at a nook in the hackberry tree and told me that the rough platform nailed into the branches had been her tree house, the place she went to be alone with her books and her daydreams.

Forming a cradle with her hands, she helped me up. I sat there in my mother’s place, looking down at my house.

At that moment, from my new perspective, it looked as small and as sweet as a toy.

Like something that belonged to a child.

This week in Home

More than 100 years ago, a man picked up an ax and built a home. The house that Frank Naccarato built is still standing and now another family is putting its own signature on it and discovering artifacts in hidden places.

The transformation of the Priest River, Idaho, cabin is our cover story.

Yvonne Watson, a new contributor, has a thrifty and creative way to decorate your home for St. Patrick’s Day.

Like any ordinary life, or a house that has seen generations come and go, this week’s issue of Home is full of surprises.

Happy hunting.