Memories I may have had (what's left behind)

Here's a revision of the story from earlier today; I realized I was trying to tell two stories. I think this works a little better.

The house across the way mirrored ours in nearly every respect, forgetting the minor details. It was undersized, like ours. Yellow, to our blue. Stood on the corner, across from us. We climbed on the couch and stood watch most nights, no one going in, and no one coming out.

On the other corner, other children did the same: watching us; we came on weekends--in the fall and winter--thanksgiving, twice. Nearly always for the Christmas tree lighting, never in January or February, when icicles grew from the eves, and fell shattering in the drive way. In the spring, we'd come back, resume our post on the couch. And in the summer we were a regular fixture in the neighborhood, riding our bikes, exploring the empty trailer at the dead end of our block, taking turns at the diving board of the local pool. There was life in the blue house, for a time.

My brother and I had decided the yellow house across from ours was empty, finally, after years of faithful watching. Sometimes we would cross the street, walk the perimeter, with long jeans, ever mindful of ticks hiding in the overgrown grass. I never got closer than that until one day my girlfriend was visiting and we decided to poke around, discovered the back door unlocked and walked in, just like that. The house was empty, but abandoned--the floors sagged under the weight of forgotten ephemera--comic books, combs, the shattered glass carafe of a coffee maker, its black, L-shaped electronic frame nearby. Upstairs, overturned mattresses and emptied closets--sheets and sheets. Twenty minutes we spent, indulging our secret intrusion into a forgotten life. And then we too left.

Later, in Centralia, Pennsylvania, we visited an entire town that had been abandoned--it was collapsing into itself, the town--a fire raged underneath, from coal that stretched for thousands of acres, sinkholes forming, swallowing townsfolk, steam rising out of cracks in the earth. And when the town was bought out, the moving vans weren't big enough for everything--hard choices were made and what didn't make the cut was thrown into a stretch of grassy road that used to lead somewhere.

We lie awake at night sometimes, a generation born of baby-boomers, talking and not talking, but always the same fear--our dubious inheritance, homes full of years of acquired souvenirs--books and videos, sculpture, painting, bolts and bolts and bolts of fabric, half re-finished chairs, basements overflowing. And when they're gone, us left to sift and sift, make the hard choices, the wheat from the chaff, and leave the rest behind.