House

For several years a bungalow nearby has stood empty and neglected. I pass it pretty much every day and I've watched it slowly become overgrown and then fall into disrepair and crumble. Every time I passed it I thought "I have got to get in there and take some pictures" there is often something beautiful in deteriorating structures. And then one day recently I drove past....and it was gone. Often this is a sign that the person who owned it, whose home it was and who has had to leave it to go into an Old Folks Home, has now died. Their estate gets settled, the house sold off and either restored to new life or developed. As I've continued to pass the place I've come to realise that the house is actually still there, it's simply changed shape. Once it was a cuboid with internal divisions, a pitched roof, windows, a chimney; now it is a mound of brick and tile and wood and glass. It's component parts that once witnessed the lives lived within it, 70 years or so of human life and loves and joys and triumphs and traumas, and then the empty years, echoing with memories and staring blindly at the time passing around it. All those parts now jumbled into a red mound, roughly the same size and shape as the countless ancient burial mounds scattered across this part of England, carved from the bone white chalk and the green turf of the Downs, housing the ancestors.