This is about a year later from the original post. Not only is the home still empty with the outside lights still on, but I went around back to see if I could get any better pictures to find that the living room lamp is on as well.
I didn’t take a picture of it yet, but you can see into some of the other rooms and tell that the house looks as if whoever left didn’t plan on leaving. There are winter boots near the slider door; I have visited several times over the past few months to see that they haven’t moved at all.
I looked up the property record card to find that the last notes made on the house involved vinyl siding being delivered in 2011; but the delivery wasn’t left there because nobody was home to receive it. There was an oil bill tucked into the garage door as well which indicated that it had been last paid on January 1st, 2019.
My conclusion isn’t very conclusive; whoever left the house last didn’t mean to. The lights were left on. The radio is on. There are bags packed for a trip of some sort near the fireplace. The house is not old; it was built in 2004. There are boots left near the slider door on a mat as if someone had left them to dry after coming in. There are family pictures in photo frames. There is an open bag of chips on the island in the kitchen with some magazines. In the summer the house is overgrown and there is no care for it. The back yard is overgrown as well. In the winter there are no footprints in the snow around the property save my own; the lights remain on.
The electricity is on. The home is being heated. This is not unnatural here in New England: owners from far away may pay the oil bill to keep pipes from freezing so that they don’t burst in the winter and destroy the house. The electricity bill may be paid so that, if there is a pump in the basement to keep water out, it continues to run so that water damage doesn’t happen.
However these things are common really only if the home would be used as a vacation home. If the house was foreclosed and thus relegated to the bank; banks normally will not take good care of the house at all and instead it would deteriorate, declining in value and decaying over time rather quickly.
Thus, like a loved one in a prolonged coma, someone is paying to keep this home alive. Perhaps whoever lived here left one day and died on the road or in some accident. If they did, it looks like it happened before a vacation somewhere. There are many things that these thoughts should call to mind; the way death doesn’t care about plans, the way we go about our lives and leave the lights on at home for a moment, only to never make it home at all. The way we attempt to extend our lives as long as possible with every pill and medication and new diet once our youth starts to flee; and to what purpose? The way we want to keep the things we love alive. The way we’re willing to pay for things we don’t see the reward in.
These are my interpretations, but I will never know - and it looks like all of you will never know along side me. So it is a shared secret; some form of shared mystery among us. I have nothing more to say now, except the words of one long ago which come to mind when visiting this empty house:
“Look, your house is left to you desolate. And verily I say unto you, you will not see me again, until the time come…”
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
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