and no one there you can kiss goodnight..."
("A House Is Not a Home" by Dionne Warwick)
In my "Signed, sealed and delivered" entry, there is an image of some piles of sand with a decrepit house directly behind it.
You may be wondering whether that is our house. The answer is yes and no.
Several years back, the parcel of lot where this house sits belongs to a good neighbor and that was their house. Before they moved away, they sold the entire property to us. That's how this house became ours. But we already have a house somewhere within the farm, a humble house that is being lived at and lovingly taken cared of. Since there was no need to maintain two houses, this house got neglected and left in its current sorry state.
An unoccupied house behind mounds of sand.
I once visited it and curiously wandered inside. Though functional, it was modest and unfinished. The wooden beams and bricks were left exposed. And so were the corrugated galvanized iron roofing. There was no ceiling. I wondered how hot it would have been inside in the middle of summer. There was no wood nor tiled floors, only dry, hard and caked soil. In the provinces, this is a typical house for a typical farmer. But for a lowly soul, surrounded by his loving and caring family, this is home. It might as well be his castle.
I'm still thinking of how we could use this relic, a memento of its previous owner. Perhaps we could repair and resurrect it as a guesthouse. A future office maybe? Somehow a viable idea eludes me. So for now, it's just as it is, an empty shell, waiting to crumble as time passes by and nature takes its course.
