The House

The trees still swayed, with the breeze making leaves swirl and dance to their familiar rhythm. The sweet smell of honeysuckle still clung to the air. Both the white picket fence and carefully painted red mailbox remained pillared in moist, sepia colored dirt. However there would be no mail delivery, and the usual chirping of small birds swooping among the branches of weathered sycamore trees was absent. The home sat atop a slightly elevated hillside with a roaming, grassy yard. By now, the children should have been home, giggling and plodding through the high grasses. Yet they weren’t. The only movement through the grass was the wind. 

The inside of the house was perfectly still and suspiciously quiet, with no movement, laughter, or conversation. The television set and audio were on, but the news camera in an empty room was pointed at only a blank backdrop, with weather long past still posted on a green screen. There were no sounds; no reporter or talk show host filled the immense silence. 

The weathered gray polyester sofa in the den still possessed the indentations of bodies that had sat comfortably ensconced before, and often. But they were no longer there. In the living room, rays of light from the waning sun passed through glass panes flanked by white shutters, pouring into the living room, and reflecting against the metallic coffee table.

Multiple layers of dust had accumulated, which would have normally been dusted routinely. The dishwasher’s cycle had long been over, yet clean dishes sat awaiting uses that would never come. The contents within the fridge sat long past their expiration dates, and had eventually rotted, spoiled, and curdled. 

Outside, tulips and hydrangeas that had once been given exceptional attention and daily maintenance were left destitute beneath the kitchen window sill, thirsting for drops of water before their pale pink and deep blue petals and stems finally withered, eventually returning to nature and the dirt from which they had once risen. 

Those who used to be responsible for the pristine condition of the house were no longer able to save it from the jaws of slow dereliction. Furry moss grew between the once sealed bricks. Cypress vines climbed from the soil, reaching almost as high as the roof, as they wrapped and write in indecipherable cursive across every window or obstacle in its path. 

The two cars in the garage had begun to rust, one with one of the doors still open open, as though someone had just hopped out to retrieve a forgotten item from the house. Excess moisture from fierce rain and high winds during recent storms had done great damage, causing sycamore trees to batter walls relentlessly, mercilessly until the small storage structure could no longer withstand it. Outside, while the rain poured, the long grass had become submerged under the immense weight of water in this almost biblical storm. Water poured in through the unlatched window and flooded the garage. A particularly long tree branch walloped the kitchen window before finally finding busting through the glass. 

Even after the storm weakened and eventually faded into a calm silence, destruction still remained. Broken gutters lay on the drenched grass, and trees that had managed to stand upright against the turbulent winds were now covered from their base to the branches in thick blankets of wooly emerald green moss.

After the storm, other sunrises and sunsets appeared among cotton candy-colored clouds, giving the appearance of tranquility almost restored. The home still sat peacefully atop its hills, against a sweeping landscape. But it looks different now. The full force of nature that had once been meticulously planted and tamed as a decorative frame for the beautiful house had gone rogue, having reclaimed its natural beauty and domineering tendencies. Not one exterior surface was left untouched by ivy, fallen branches, or moss that had pervaded the structures. The inside of the home, now with an obvious hole in the wall and a window broken from the storm, smelled of wet grass and creeping mold as warm sun rays still managed to bound in and out by peaking through the expansive vines. 

This was Nature’s reminder that all life cycles come and go. 

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