This image came to me last September. I wrote it down and it sat for a while teasing my imagination. It’s now the opening of an untitled novel-in-progress.
The summer after the old man died, the house started to fall apart. First the roof—with shingles falling during an early summer windstorm—and then the basement flooding with a late summer rain. It was as if the house had been holding on until grandpa died and, once he was gone, it was time for the house to go, too.
It wasn’t hard to sell out and move on. There were all too many buyers for the land. They were anxious to tear down the house and replace it with a monstrous new home for wealthy summer people. It’s always that way. The old makes room for the new. The big family room disappears into a cathedral ceiling, the cozy kitchen gives way to a showplace with gleaming new appliances, the backyard is eaten by a deck and maybe a pool, plus a climate-controlled garage to house an expensive car—or two or three.
The lot was large for the house. What had been a garden was a mess of overgrown weeds and aging fruit trees. The sale would be easy. No one in the family put up an argument. We just set about clearing the place out. The, now ‘elder generation’ (my uncles), gave us—the ‘young adults’—the summer to enjoy the beach while we erased the past, reasoning that we had both the time and energy and were burdened with fewer memories of the place their parents had built as a family summer retreat.
Everything had to be gone before the sale and the wrecking ball!
Untitled Novel by Candida B. Korman…
