The House

Tucked in between the remnants of forgotten history and the evidence of regeneration stands a house with a story.

Just a stone’s throw from the busy road, the old house remains, shadowed by ancient trees. In contrast to the developing industry of strip malls and convenience stores growing up around it, the three-story Victorian with her covered porch jutting out from the front could easily be overlooked. But for the imaginative passer, just a glimpse is enough to know that this place is full of stories.

Generations of them.

Some of the stories were wonderful, I’m sure, filled with family and meals and just washed laundry hanging in the yard, kids playing hide-n-seek around the flapping sheets.

But the last story this poor house had to tell could not have been a good one.

Most houses that have been left by their people for quieter neighborhoods or safer walls stand stoic, defiant even, with their boarded up entries and silenced walls, dejected as day after day, alone and left behind, the weather beats them down until they bend and eventually break.

But this particular house, this one that captured my attention with only a glimpse as I sped passed her sagging structure, was crying.

Sorrow oozed from her contours. Chimneys that had once brought warmth and light from within them now bowed in heartache.

She stood more than alone now. She was powerless.

Not only had she been abandoned, left alone to never again feel the warmth of life living inside her, but someone, before they had left her, had beaten her up.

As if abandonment alone wasn't enough.

Most likely, she was not the real object of her attacker's wrath, but the evidence showed, she was the one that had taken the blows.

Not unlike most abandoned houses whose windows have not first been boarded up by protective leavers with tentative hopes of return, her windows had been smashed, the panes shattered, rimmed with shards of leftover glass that their casings were too stubborn to let go.

Most broken windows of empty houses are indicators of intruders who have wielded their weapon upon the eyes of a home as a means to enter it and take from it what is not rightly theirs.

But what made this site sadder though, than a typical house left alone to fade, was that her windows appeared to have been broken from the inside.

Chairs, and even a table, had been flung through them and were resting still, in the places they had fallen, on the roof of the once mighty front porch, below they windows they had been forced to destroy.