Reasons for Knocking At An Empty House (After Bill V.)

31 Johnson Ave in Mount Sterling, Kentucky was the first home I ever owned. In 2013, my wife Sarah and I moved to Kentucky for my teaching job and bought the house cheap, a fixer upper in a small town near a small city. Our son was born and we lived there for three and a half years, until Sarah became suddenly ill from bacterial meningitis and died after three and a half months in the hospital. Our son was in preschool in Lexington (the small city) and he and I needed to move there so he would have continuity in his life with that at least (the commute to Lexington, to my school, to Lexington and back would have been untenable). I decided to sell our house. A local realtor came and met with me to go over the details and after a few months, it sold. Sarah and I had done so much work on the house (ourselves, we didn’t have money to hire contractors) and imagined taking lovely, sun-lit photos of the renovated rooms to impress prospective buyers, should we ever move. I never looked at the real estate listing–I told the realtor what I wanted to get for the house and that was that.

Over the years since then, the house has been the backdrop and setting for my memories of our time as a family, as the place the three of us lived together for a short while–the only place we lived. Despite knowing better than to do so, late one night I searched for our old address online and found the Zillow listing. It contained 44 photos taken by the local realtor who sold the house. They were snapshots taken with a digital point and shoot camera–there were even orange dates superimposed on the lower right hand corner of the pictures. Some were taken in July 2013, when Sarah was still alive, and most were taken in October 2017, when she was not. In the realtor’s photos the house is empty, devoid of anything marking us as its owners, save the white walls and occasional intentional use of plywood. The photos are awkwardly framed–sometimes I struggle to identify which room we’re seeing. Viewed as a collection, the photos give a detached view of the empty house, of the space, of the light on those summer and autumn days.. I see my toddler son playing with IKEA trains on the floor, my late wife reclining on our blue sofa. The old listing on Zillow ends with “This Can Be Your Home!!!!”, and it could, or could have been your home in 2013, as much as anything is ownable or knowable or understandable, then, now or ever.

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