#dilapidated

There's something mesmerizing about falling-down houses. Sometimes it's clearly a sharecropper's cabin and you're glad to see it fall but other times it's this cozy little thing that was set deep in the woods before the highway cleaved the trees open and now it's an empty little shell with moss growing on the roof and a tree sprouting through the porch. You view it as a landmark and pass by it a thousand times only to look again to notice that the roof finally caved under last winter's ice and snow. Sometimes it's not even a house but a pile of timber with a collapsed brick chimney overgrown in morning glory and wisteria, the patch of rewilded iris or daffodil in the front the only clue that people lived there once.