It is my house now. And as I look upon it today, for the first time since I watched it vanish behind through the rear window of a police car ten years ago, it is at once as familiar as it is strange, as comforting as it is haunting. Abandoned and empty, the shrubbery around it has grown unchecked, blocking the lower windows in shapeless mounds.  A single vine coils itself neatly up the clapboards to the roof, which has buckled and sagged, leaving the house looking strangely like a masked bandit. The woods where we used to shoot at squirrels and tin cans have closed in on the modest house like arms sucking it deeper into the darkness.  I’m wondering what is left in there of my life, of my family. It is my house now. Starting today its fate is in my hands.

Stepping out of the feral landscape, I pick three burrs out of my pants and reflexively brush down my legs, though there is nothing to remove. The cement stoop seems solid, but I lose my footing somehow and grab for the railing that isn’t there anymore. Instead I catch a sturdy but thorny vine. Regaining my balance, I let my eyes follow the vine down to into the overgrowth where a pink flower is trying to bloom, then back up again and around as it wound it’s way through the dense shrubbery, covered in buds.  My mother planted a rosebush when I was a child. For all the attention she lavished on it every summer she’d never gotten more than a rose or two and the bush had sat there looking exposed and pathetic. Now here it was growing wild and leggy out of the wreckage. I reach for the doorknob but stop to bring my hand to my mouth and suck off the blood. I wipe my hands on my jeans, pressing my thumb into the spot that won’t stop bleeding. A dog barks behind me and I turn to see my old neighborhood spread out in front of me. The McEwen’s house across the street boasting a new family room over the gara by Lonely Acrobat