THIS OLD HOUSE
This old house is just sitting here in the dusk by the side of the road that I am driving on, on my way away from Birmingham to Blountsville, just this side of nowhere.
The sun and the mellowed-red skies are behind the house, and the streaked clouds glow, casting the front of the house into shadows. Shadows that are not quite ebony, not quite grey, not yet blackened.
This old house sitting in the dusk looks abandoned but sturdy, a place you could still move into and live a life should you choose. But it looks like nobody has been here for quite some time. The windows have no inner glow to them, as if lights and lanterns have not been turned on for years.
Houses like this old house are always considered haunted by my generation and my parents’ generation. Some are scared to enter houses that are old and not quite stylish. Afraid they will run into things that a well-lighted carpeted air-conditioned suburban home would not possibly contain. Things like ghosts and spirits and nesting animals and crawly critters.
There is something different about this old house, though. It just sits here empty but ready for occupancy. It is not run down and abused like those feared old houses of yore. Nobody has vandalized it or marked it for demolition, desolation.
Nobody wants this old house right this instant.
My first thought in seeing this old house is, I’ll bet there are some really interesting ghosts in that place! But something nudges me, pushes me one notch further. No, this is a house so lonely that it would gladly welcome ghosts.
This is a house so forlorn that even the ghosts have moved out, gone on to other hauntings.
The hair stands up on the back of my neck.
Both life and death have been sucked out of the wooden floors and plaster walls.
This old house now just rests in a time zone all its own, and it is just a matter of time before either curious humans or curious ghosts take a second look and try to decide whether this elegant corpse is ready for rejuvenation, reanimation.
Or whether it is now so much a part of the landscape that it will be abandoned and willed to the winds and the rains and the scorching days and the humid nights, till it looks once more like the red clay earth from which it sprang
© Jim Reed 2020 A.D.