Demolished house

      The house was small. And white. On Catherine Street, two blocks from my own. With black shutters that never closed once — decorative. Grasping, along with the coach lights, toward some whiff of colonial splendor that almost seems a joke when you think about it. A symbolic white handkerchief of elegance in a neighborhood where people build gigantic faux farmhouses. Where some build enormous homes, live in them a bit, then, decide these estates just aren't big enough, buy the lot next door and double the size of their already huge house into some kind of super huge house.     

     I've thought of knocking on the door and demanding a tour — "What do you do with all that room?" A bad idea, at houses where I've literally never seen a person outside, coming or going. Not in years.

     But that wouldn't go over well. Not my place, literally or figuratively, not as a local dog walker and humble senior citizen, newly enrolled in Medicare. With a half price Metra pass freshly installed in my wallet, awaiting its first use. 
     The chain link fence went up weeks ago,. Maybe months. Then last week, the Caterpillar excavator arrived, signalling the brink of doom for the old home. I tried to imagine the years of life unfolding there, the new couples arriving, the babies squirming, the children running around. The gradual deprecations of time, ignored as always. Or as Mary Oliver writes:

We did not hear, beneath our lives,
The old walls falling out of true,
Foundations shifting in the dark.
When seedlings blossomed in the eaves,
When branches scratched upon the door
And rain came splashing through the halls,
We made our minor, brief repairs,
And sang upon the crumbling stairs
And danced upon the sodden floors.  

     A vague and haunting image of happy life when it is past. Though honestly, I failed completely, conjuring up the lives unfolding here. Hard to imagine the life of someone you know, a person standing in front of you. Hard enough to remember your own, sometimes. Doing so from the architecture of a house about to be torn down is impossible. At least for me.
     The house is ... what? 1930s? That would be my guess, but I'm not knowledgable about such things and invite correction.  Colonial revival was a style throughout much of the 20th century — some 40 percent of American homes built in the 1920s reflected it. 

     I didn't dwell on the house being pulled down, which couldn't take an hour. There's enough cause for melancholy in my own life without channeling anybody else's. Two days later, when I passed again, the house was rubble, the bricks already palleted up — old bricks are a hot commodity. Apparently, we just can't make them like we used to. Something about the minerals in the clay. Or maybe we could, but don't bother. The current not-quite-so-nice bricks are good enough.

      Someday soon my wife and I will stroll by this empty lot, and she'll say, "I don't remember what was there." And at least now I'll say, "I have a picture, if you're really interested."

    The Oliver poem ends this way:

For years we lived at peace, until
The rooms themselves began to blend
With time, and empty one by one,
At which we knew, with muted hearts,
That nothing further could be done,
And so rose up, and went away,
Inheritors of breath and love,
Bound to that final black estate
No child can mend or trade away.