Structural Failure

When I took out the garbage this morning I saw this across the street. Strong winds last night took the wall right off a little abandoned house, exposing its innards and its history of neglect. Most striking to me was how the layers of attempts to stop the downward soggy sagging of a slumping roof - a shredded tarp, a roll of roofing tacked on top - may have only made things worse for the aged lathe walls beneath. The place is a raw hole in the neighborhood. Nobody lived here recently, but the remains of household inside the decaying structure - old appliances, a pressure cooker that looks like a torture device, curtains and tablecloth, and some silk flowers on the floor - are the remains of somebody's home. I hope they're somewhere better now.