2002-11-07 - 7:52 p.m.
When I went home for lunch yesterday there was something going on down the street. The yard of the small blue bungalow was full of stuff, and a lot of people mingled about. Are they having a yard sale, I wondered.... or is someone moving in? This was a rental house that had been unoccupied all summer, so I really suspected it was the latter. Nosy neighbor that I am, I sat in the car and watched for a few minutes before going inside.
But when I arrived home from work, four hours later, I discerned that it was neither. I saw several people with what looked like masks on their faces carrying boxes and other objects. A large yellow dumpster, of the sort you find at construction sites, was parked in the street, and the pile of boxes beside the driveway had grown to the heighth of a wall.
There was only one thing to do. Changing quickly into my sweat pants and sneakers, I snapped a leash on the dog (dogs really do come in handy sometimes) and set out in that direction for my afternoon �walk.� Slowly. When I got near the blue bungalow, I had to walk in the street because the overflow of stuff had spilled onto the sidewalk. And there I happened to run into the owner of the house, one of the masked figures that I had seen circling the dumpster. Since he recognized me as one of the homeowners on the block, he offered up the scoop. All this stuff had been left behind by the former tenant. And since she just basically disappeared in the night, without notice and leaving no forwarding address, he had been tied up in legal proceedings for months in order to reclaim his house. And this was what he found. Mountains of stinking, rotting, junk. The sheriff had been there earlier, (I guess when you do a formal �eviction� the sheriff has to be the one to take possession.) and said this was the second-worst case he had ever seen. I could see inside the open doors of the house and see that there were still boxes stacked all the way to the ceiling in the living room and the garage. In a few minutes, I understood why they were wearing masks and had thrown the doors and windows open. A sickening, moldy, rotten odor was emanating from the house. Time to move on. I expressed my sympathy to Mr. Landlord and walked on down to block for some better air.
I know it is a kind of sickness, the need to collect and save everything. I saw a story on television about a woman with a pathological inability to throw away anything, even something awful like the hair from the bathroom drain. Occasionally the newspaper runs some sensational story about some elderly person found living in a house filled with fifty years worth of newspapers and tin cans. Usually though, the person has a lifetime accumulation of stuff that just becomes overwhelming as they grow older. But the woman who lived here was in her forties, and had been there probably less than two years. She had previously rented a house from another landlord on our block and was asked to leave in a few months. We heard rumors that she was �crazy,� and we looked upon her with some suspicion for a while, but after a time it began to seem like a lame accusation. The woman, whose name was Amy, was always friendly and chatty. She was nearly always outside with her little wire-haired terrier. When we got a puppy and found ourselves running in and out a dozen times a day taking him to �go good doggy� we struck up a sort of offhanded little friendship with the �crazy lady.� She was a nurse, she said, and worked odd shifts, which explained her irregular comings and goings. She loved animals, and seemed to know lots of other people on the block.
Often she was accompanied by a little girl, a shy, delicate seven-year-old named Kelly, who she said was her niece. It seemed strange that she would have the child so much, sometimes for weeks at a time, considering that she was single and had such an erratic schedule. But then one day she told us that she was fighting for custody of the little girl. Kelly had been living with her father who was sexually abusing her. The details of the situation were heartbreaking. The little girl would come back from visits with her father with dirty words written on her little body with magic marker. We offered our support and encouragement, and even tried to think of how we could help to make things easier for them. I began stopping to talk to Kelly more often, and she loved to play with our dog and watch me sketching outside.
Their lives did seem to be looking up, though, the day that Amy stopped us in the street and joyfully reported that the custody battle had been won and she was Kelly�s official guardian. Kelly seemed to be looking a little happier, a little less scared, as she rode her scooter up and down the street. And one day, her face beaming, she came up to show me her new prize: a tiny wire-haired terrier puppy, a perfect miniature of her aunt�s dog. I wasn�t too surprised, either, when Kelly told me one day that they were moving, so she could go to a new school. The public schools in this part of town are scary, and that seemed like a reasonable thing to do.
And then they were gone. With no moving van, no cartons, no yard sale, no u-haul, no good-byes. Just gone. About the time we realized we hadn�t seen them around for a while, a sign appeared on the door of the house.
Looking back, the one thing that seemed strange about her was that she was always outside. Even if you ran out at midnight, chances are you would see her, just kind of sauntering in the street with the dogs. She always seemed to be fiddling with things in her car or sitting on her porch or front steps in all kinds of weather, early and late. Now I realize there probably wasn�t room for them inside with all the junk.
In so many ways she seemed perfectly normal. But now I wonder if anything she told us was true. Maybe she was just living a life on the run, moving away from one mountain of trash after another. Maybe she had no ability to choose what she wanted, and could only run away from it when it became too overwhelming.
I don�t know. That�s the whole thing about it. I don�t know, and I am sort of taken aback at this revelation of how deceiving appearances can be.
This morning as I drove by, I saw that the crew excavating the house has largely finished their work. The dumpster was still in the street, mounded high with boxes, and a pile of large items has been set out for the trash pickup. And there, sitting atop the whole pile, was an enormous white fuzzy stuffed monster, perhaps representing bigfoot, or the abominable snowman. For a moment it seemed to me as though this must be the culprit, as though the monster had at last been routed from his den. We have found the enemy and he is vanquished. Oh, wouldn�t it be easy if we could identify anyone�s source of misery and drag it out to the trash heap and be done with it. But we never see the strange, dark side of a friendly woman with two dogs and a little girl with a scooter. And maybe that�s the reason it scares us so much.
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