Sunday, November 08, 2015
Sunday Reflection: Detritus
Driving in Detroit, sometimes you come across a house like the one pictured above. The doors and windows are gone, and perhaps the roof. Sometimes there is a tree growing inside of what was once a home. It isn't empty, though; people have dumped things into the empty vessel. Tires, scrap metal of low value, and lots of old and broken furniture and mattresses. It's too much stuff to have come from the original occupants, unless they were serious hoarders. At times, it is stacked up to what was once the second floor.
I have never seen anyone actually dumping the stuff in such a house, though I have looked. I imagine them, though, in a pickup truck backed up to the empty hull. Why put it in the abandoned house? Why not just toss it into the empty lot it sits on?
There is no basis for this, really, but I imagine that they put it into the house because they think that maybe someone else will use it. Even in an act of blight, there is this little bit of hope, this sliver of a chance of redemption.
