Do you ever get a weird sort of feeling when you pass a home that’s obviously dying? You know what I mean; houses long empty that are dark and shadowy even though the sun is shining brightly? Houses that stare out at the world with window eyes that can no longer see, their panes jagged and broken from rocks thrown by bored and entitled kids? Houses that are just crumbling walls held up by crumbling memories and slowly, so slowly imploding?
I frequently pass one of those old timers as I’m as usual getting lost a few miles from where we live. I know nothing about that old place any longer. I know a family lived there because I saw them all many years ago working around the place, living their lives in that house, but now they’re all gone and have been for a long time, and the lonely grieving house is beginning to surrender to nature and sag. No one ever comes to take care of it and make it come alive again and the only life in it now is of the creature persuasion.
For me, oddly, the sight of old, worn and raggedy curtains at the windows makes me feel the most melancholy when I’m looking at an enfeebled and deserted home. I don’t get it either. Maybe it’s because I imagine a young bride happily hanging pretty curtains at the windows of her first real home, but then as the years passed and children and problems and life and death began to crowd, torment and darken her shimmer, she forgot about those once pretty pieces of material. They were never taken down and washed, so hung there for years and years, and faded and rotted, just as life had for her, and her once pretty curtains now shakily billow and tear when the wind rushes through the old broken, empty house.
One late frigid late afternoon with Christmas about a month away, I drove by that old forgotten home and saw one of those plastic electric candles at a front window people use today because real candles are unsafe, and they burn or blow out all the time anyway. The stories of a candle always burning in a window have had many incarnations but none of those tales came to my mind in that wintery dusk when I first saw it.
Who had put it there? Could it be there was still electricity on that house? I was puzzled as I drove home. Weeks later I tremulously took my courage into my hands or wherever foolish courage lands, and decided to walk around the outside of that old empty home. I did lean in and looked through a few windows but clearly the home had been stripped of its innards years before. It was creepy there but I could not stop snooping. It was also very windy and the wind howled through the broken windows of the place and as I rounded a corner, I saw wires whipping through the air, their ends attached to a corner of the home. They’d once been attached there when electricity was in use, but they’d been disconnected and abandoned. So how, I wondered, is that fake plastic electric candle staying lit? It was all getting weirder and weirder so I semi-trotted back to my car and unlike in the movies, it did start up instantly and I roared away in the dark.
That small glowing candle was still there weeks later, and then on through Christmas but it had faded more and then more again each time I saw it standing on that window ledge between the ragged, old faded curtains. I think they’d once been a bright yellow with smatterings of pink roses on them, but now were grey and old and so fragile with age they were crumbling to the sills beneath them. Poignant. Mysterious. Sad. By Spring the candle had faded to nearly nothing, a weak and dim glimmer, and then had burned out completely, and the old, unloved empty house sighed and finally fell in upon itself.
LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer.
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