The sun never hit our house on the ridge. Pine trees surrounded it on three sides, their branches hugging its dirty-white walls. The wind that whipped down the mountain shook needles and cones onto our roof and into the rusted gutters. Moss crawled up the cinderblock foundation. Fingers of cool, green mold wrapped around the unfinished basement walls. Ivy spilled down the steep hill from the house, tangling around the stones of the driveway’s retaining wall. Ghosts were everywhere—between the perfectly straight lines of apple trees, beneath the peach and pear trees, ensnared in the gooseberry bushes and the grapevines twisting up rotted wooden posts.
My husband, Jesse, and I did not actually own this property—we rented it from a veterinarian friend of ours—but we had plans for it. A small barn stood about a hundred feet from the house, and we hoped to convert it into a rehabilitation area for injured and orphaned birds. Peach trees lined the grassy path that led from our house to the barn; tiger swallow tail butterflies and goldfinches crowded the high purple thistles along the path’s edge. The overgrown remains of another nearby shed, this one brick with no roof, were barely noticeable, buried in a thick patch of deer tongue and rosebushes. The path ended at the barn, which was a perfectly square structure, its dimensions about thirty feet by thirty feet, its base several rows of stacked cinderblocks. The walls and roof were scalloped sheet metal. The side facing the house gaped like a garage without a door. The vines that tangled around the cinderblocks bordering the open front threatened to spill the blocks and wreck the barn.
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