We moved into our house, a tiny 800 square foot "cottage" in a suburb of Seattle, almost 3 years ago. The cottage, which I often refer to as the "smurf house" when providing friends with directions, is surrounded by towering evergreens and lush green Northwest greenery (pictured here, along with neighbor squirrel).
It is also located about 500 feet from our neighbor's "cabin". Cabin is the only word that comes to mind, because the main materials that comprise our neighbor's home appear to be wood and moss. Tree house may be a more appropriate title, were it up a tree. And it may as well be, because the density of the forest surrounding the cabin is on par with the background scenery of an X-files episode.
The occupant of this home has been, and continues to be, a mystery to us. He looks like a disgruntled Santa Claus, rarely has visitors, and rarely returns our timid waves when we do happen to see him emerge from his wooded nest. I can't say we've been knocking down his door (literally OR figuratively) to befriend him, but we've definitely made a few efforts to let him know that we're friendly. Yet we've never spoken with him. To this day, our only background knowledge of the person who lives next to us is from the old ladies on our block.
Apparently the neighbor's family used to own the entire block, before there were any other homes there. Little bits of the land were sold off one by one, eventually leaving the neighbor's family with only a few acres. Our neighbor, the last surviving member of his family of origin as far as we can tell, now has the last remaining piece of that original land. And our bit of land was the last piece to go. However, before our little parcel and home was sold to, um, whoever it was sold to first, it used to serve as a guest cottage for some type of elderly person in the neighbor's family. Perhaps his grandmother? We don't know.
What I do know is that I've watched too many episodes of the X-files and Criminal Minds. I frequently imagine that the grandmother died IN our house, and still hangs out there, smoking ghost cigarettes out in the backyard and spooking our former cat (perhaps this is why former cat would whine ALL night long, hence the "former" status). I'd love to know more about this imaginary ghost, and about the history of our house in general. But the problem is- I'm too busy imagining that our neighbor is the subject of a Criminal Minds episode, harboring innocent victims in some underground lair of his cabin.
So my overactive imagination went haywire this past weekend when, in the midst of a bathroom remodel, my husband found a newspaper from 1926 underneath the old flooring. The spooky part: our house was supposedly built in 1952. Insert creepy synthesizer X-files soundtrack here.
We'd love to get to the bottom of this mystery, and the answer is probably something completely mundane. Perhaps our house was moved to its current location from another plot and thus the date it was built was actually the date it was moved, or something like that. And if anyone would know about our house and the chain-smoking ghost who occupies it, it would be our neighbor.
So my goal is to calm my overactive imagination and have a bit of compassion. Perhaps I might even work up the nerve to knock on our neighbor's door, without having to call Moulder and Scully or the FBI special victims unit for backup. Most likely, he is just an odd and lonely old man who would actually love an occasional visit and a cute little boy running into his forest from time to time. And I refuse to become one of those hyper-vigilant moms who lives in fear of the worst possible outcome to every unknown situation, simply because of my mother bear instincts. I've come to believe that 99% of the humans on this planet have good intentions. Now if I could just stop watching horrible TV shows about the other 1%, I might be able to live by this belief.
No comments:
Post a Comment