Maureen Stanton carpenter ants that was—miraculously—holding up one corner of the house (discovered, of course, long after I’d purchased the place). The four cats were gone by the time I closed on the house (there was an official eviction notice delivered by a county sheriff to the person whose name was on a phone bill found in the house). The house was filled with detritus and possessions and trash and furniture of several abandoned lives. Left behind were dozens of reeking trash bags filled with used cat litter, heavy as cement, and board games from the sixties (Aggravation), and furniture from the seventies (leatherette), and rusty cans of baby peas (must we eat the babies?). There were no less than twenty pairs of size 12 women’s shoes, mostly pumps, and I momentarily thought perhaps a transvestite had lived there. There were several patent leather pocketbooks containing wadded up tissues from someone’s long ago colds. Doris Hayes, the owner of the house, went into a nursing home in 1993, nearly a decade before I bought the house. She died in 1999, and the house was taken by the Maine Department of Human Services to pay off the $60,890 that Mrs. Hayes owed to the state for her care. According to the deed, the house was sold for a dollar to Mrs. Hayes by a Mrs. Mildred McCabe, who left a package in the attic marked, “Sketches of Mildred McCabe.” Mildred’s husband, Carl, left a leatherbound collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets, inscribed in a penmanship of another era and dated 1888, along with a pair of octagonal gold-framed eyeglasses. Setting aside recyclable materials and objects good enough for Goodwill, my mother and my friend, Nancy, and I hauled to the roadside no less than 300 large garbage bags of junk. The pile was taller than me, four feet deep, and spanned the length of the southern boundary of my property. I had to call the junk hauler three times; even he—tsar of trash removal in the county—remarked on the sheer volume of stuff we emptied from the 823-square-foot house. There were bags and bags of rust-stained clothes—hung on hangers for years in a damp closet—and musty books shred to bits by the four bored, trapped cats. Years-old phone bills for hundreds of dollars. A manual for nursing assistants. Bottles of booze, and dozens of bottles of nail polish, and bikini underwear on the floor throughout the house, and cat kibbles, and half-full liters of Coke and grimy jars of spices, a baby crib, two televisions, several boxes of bullets for a .22 caliber pistol, pizza boxes, and juice bottles marked in indelible ink, “1993 Water.” Two dollars in food stamps, and $1.67 in pennies scattered all over the floor. And macrame plant hangers, and a sewing machine, and patterns, Crab Orchard Review
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