This old house

Recently, when I went to get my car "fixed" (a couple simple recalls I could have done in my own driveway come to find out!) I was tootling down the road back to my house when something caught my eye. This abandoned house. I don't know what it is, but there is a draw when it comes to old houses like this, and after I passed it, I forced myself to turn around and go back as normally a house like this either doesn't exist, or is gated up, but this one was not.

There's a down side to owning a jeep, and that's the idea that you can drive through anything, anywhere. Just ask my husband that got it stuck in a snowbank in our *back yard* 3 days after we bought it. So I start to roll up the over the hill on what only could be described as a "very former" driveway of sorts. I'm going to admit that even though it was broad daylight, my heart did start to race a little. "What if I get caught up here?" "What if some farmer comes along and screams at me, and brings his shot gun?" "What if the boogey man gets me!" (I was most worried about the last one). As I got closer to the house, you could see more sadness in it than anything else. You could tell that it had been occupied not so terribly long ago as it had parts that seemed much more "new" than others. As I disappeared over the hill where no one could see me (this is the part where I get hacked to bits and left for dead, only to find my skull and rusted out jeep 9 months later), I turned around behind the house and this is the part that seemed the most sad to me.

It looked as though someone had planned an addition to the house at one point, but it was never finished. It makes me wonder if someone had lots of hope for this pretty house high on a hill in the middle of Missouri. Hopes, dreams and aspirations of a house full of kids - so full that they had to add on. But then what happened that made them stop? Did they run out of money? Or was it worse than that?

I literally stayed for less than 5 minutes (please reread the part about finding my skull sometime in December), so I bid the house adieu and came home to appreciate my unfinished remodeling projects maybe just a little more than I did before.