The lawnmower slept in an idle fold, dressed in week-old grass clippings.
The gas can sat on a shelf above, recently filled.
The fertilizer bag stood against the garage wall, curled down from the opening. A topsoil bag lay prone nearby, grass seed on top.
This is what I noticed when I opened my parents’ garage after my step-father died.
It was a picture of the potential of a life in progress and projects left unfinished. His presence was here.
In this way, I thought, haunted houses are very much real.
In Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, author Colin Dickey lights a path through this darkness of grief.
“This is another way to make sense of that haunting sensation: to walk into a home and recognize, even if you can’t name the feeling, that someone else not only lived here but adopted patterns of life completely alien to your own, whose daily ritual and marks of wear will never match your own.
Haunted houses are the repository of the dreams dreamt inside them—both our dreams and those of previous occupants. This can make even the most simple of houses feel, at times, alive.”
I do not believe in ghosts as a spectral presence. I believe in ghosts as a void – an absence of a life cut short.
You can walk through their rooms, look through their belongings. You can see their plans, their habits. Their legacy. You remember as much of them as you can. You think about what could have been and never will be. And it breaks you in a way you have never known.
Then you go outside to start the lawnmower, so you can try to keep the grass as nice as it was.
