Friday Foto #42

Our Friday Foto for this week goes no further than across the street from our house. To Spot’s House. Those of you who have been around for a while on my blog know about Spot, the neighbor who used to live in the house there across the street before he passed away late last year. Kristi and I have said for months, since his house went up for sale, that “someone was gonna buy it for the lot and mow it down.” Well, that very thing happened this week. I went out for lunch and when I came back, this giant orange monster had just clawed into the back of Spots house. I immediately grabbed a drink and sat out there on our porch eating my tacos and watching his house come crumbling down to this—in just over an hour.

I had never seen a house get demo’d before, and although I have seen backhoe’s that size before, never in action, and it was equally amazing, and sad. Amazing because of the power this machine possesses and the ease at which it can destroy a structure in no time at all. Sad because this was the home that Spot and his wife built and lived in for over 70 yrs.—raised a family in, entertained company in, grew old in—only to have their home demolished in about 70 minutes. Walls were pulled down in seconds, the fireplace was crushed in one move of the giant bucket on the front of the backhoe, and there was nothing saved of their home. Just loaded into dumptrucks, and hauled off.

I also thought of the thousands of times that family sat around their dining table, just being family, and I smiled at the thought of that most likely being a happy home, filled with good memories of a job well done by Spot and his wife, who past away several years ago shortly after we moved in. Spot was an amazing man, and I wish that I could have been adopted by him many times over, and sometimes felt like I had adopted him as my grandpa. He never knew it though.

For me, this is the last link to Spot here on earth, because I have no other visual of him to look out at now. That’s sad, because whatever happens over there on that lot will not have the significance of the previous owner. We may wind up being great neighbors, but Spot cannot be replaced. The other thing I thought about the other day as I pounded my tacos, was that just like the backhoe being able to destroy a home in minutes, so too can we do the same—just with different tools. Like our language to and around our family, or like neglect or emotional abuse of the ones you share a roof with, or infidelity and betrayal of the one you are in covenant with. These things and others similar, can rip a home apart as fast as that big orange monster across the street.

How did I get all of this out of a house being pulled down and demolished? I don’t know . . . except that I think a house is more than just a building—it’s a home. It’s that place where life really happens, or at least should, with a family. Where people connect, interact, laugh and sometimes cry together. And for a man that was quite dear to me, the bigger picture stuff of how a home can be destroyed was what ran through my mind as his house was destroyed.

So hopefully the tools that can destroy your home don’t exist in your house. If they do, go back to your foundation, and check to make sure it is solid, do some repairs and fix it before all that exists in your home gets ripped apart. It can happen faster than you think.