Halfway up M Street is a house that is more museum than residence. I've lived in the neighborhood for 11 years and, in all that time, the house has stood empty. I suspect it has been standing vigil long before I first noticed it.
The only thing that seems to still be functioning in the house is the light timer that clicks on each morning before Finn and I make our way up the sidewalk. Almost always, I turn my head towards the house, wondering what it was that someone walked away from. Why has no one come back to let in some fresh air? What is it they cannot bare to let go of?
Lately, when I walk by, I half expect to see a fox or a family of raccoons sitting on the couch, reading an old Life Magazine or catching some 70s rerun on TV.
Imagining a wild animal taking up residence on M makes me think of the young mouse family that showed up in my birdseed container a few years ago. What seemed, at first, like nirvana--the perfect place to raise a family, with all that good seed acting as both bedding and breakfast--eventually became their death sentence. The metal walls around them were too tall, too slick to scurry up. Their bellies swollen with safflower, one day, the mice must have realized that they could never leave. Thirst replaced hunger and container became coffin.
There is something disturbing about seeing an abandoned building. It feels at once both intimate and dismissive, as though the very moment of abandonment holds too much mystery and loss to keep it to itself. What seeps out as I pass is some combination of history and fiction, an unsettling brew whose ingredients I can never quite identify.
In the pre-dawn darkness, I search the front window for clues to the story that sits within, imagining movement and laughter, the smell of coffee wafting up the staircase. And I know, somehow, that this is one of those stories with a sad, quiet ending.
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