A short ride down the hillside into the hallow we found a quaint two-story house, unoccupied yet accompanied by the realtor and her blue station wagon. She waited for us on the dirt path leading up to the porch from the patchy stone drive. She was curious, as they all are when we go hunting, what interest we would have in such a house as this.
The exterior was unusual for the type of home we usually search out, and I was fearful that we had wasted our trip. In the lawn of scrub grass we found the large rusted rim of a large vehicle that had at one time served as a planter, but now made itself home for only the most hardy weeds that grow in this brisk mid-October climate. Only a few odd adornments littered the outer walls of the house near its cinder block pilings - a one-wheeled and tubeless bicycle, several cans of obviously unused all-weather paint, three sledgehammer handles.
For all the wear on the rain-washed wooden siding, the oak door of the house was reasonably well shielded under small eaves, and seemed to have held up better over the years than the storm door, of which there was no evidence but hinges. Both the knob and the small knocker were the only thing of visible substance to the home from the outside, their tarnished brass still shining enough against the backdrop of flaking paint and wooden decay to shine like two gold nuggets amongst a pile of coal. It was the only thing that kept us from taking off without seeing inside.
The realtor turned the key in the lock, loosened the knob, and pushed hard against the door. Some weight behind the door held it closed, and it took the two of us to finally push the door open due to the blockage. Immediately, the smell overcame us. It was more of a dusty smell than mildew or mold - very dry, but thick.
Inside the door was a living room, small like nearly everything about this house. If the room was small, the space was smaller. The previous owner had left the room filled with unlabeled filing boxes, the kind you find unassembled in bulk at the stationery store. Our eyes went wide at this outrageous find and, much to the dismay of our guide, we dove directly for the piles of boxes.
In the first box I found several self-help books whose titles were unfamiliar.
