Tonight the house across the street is being auctioned off. Its renters were evicted last month, and the house was repossessed by the bank. It's not the only eviction on my block this spring.
Both houses to the left of me are for sale. In addition to the auction across the street, there's another sale two doors down. No one is visiting these houses, though the signs and sale flyers are out. Strange men in SUVs are circling the auction house, trying to assess its value. The starting bid is $10,000. The house is in bad shape. A month ago, I saw people moving out of the auction house in a hurry. They might have been hoarders -- through their front window I saw newspapers and junk stacked to the ceiling, and their yard was full of toilets and other strange stuff. I don't remember the people, just their stuff. The stuff is gone now, the people too. I bought my house -- the first I've ever owned -- in October of 2009. I was laid off three days after the sale closed.But for me, there's not much danger. After months of unemployment and scrambling, I've got work. The auction house people -- who knows? After they cleared out, bars were put over the windows and the door, and scary notices placed in the windows. Trespassers will be prosecuted. Creepy SUV guys, not so much. At the end of our block there used to be a billboard that said "Foreclosure affects the whole family." Yeah, duh. I watched as my next-door neighbors' toddler played on their U-Haul loading ramp. I watched as the people next to them put three desiccated Christmas trees on the curb -- which haven't been picked up, because they stopped paying their garbage service bills. The billboard's foreclosure message has now been removed; in its place is a beer ad featuring a tropical paradise. Despite all this, there are kids playing in the street, there are people walking dogs, the lilacs are in bloom. It's a beautiful evening, sunny and warm. Spring marches on, even if no one is there to see it. __________________________About the author: Chris Higgins is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. He writes a daily blog for mentalfloss.com, and he's a frequent contributor to mental_floss magazine.