Broken-Down House
could have passed as a bomb site. That’s when my father-in-law stopped the car. The first thing that hit me was the condition of the front yard. The grass was beyond cutting; it needed harvesting. Scattered across this suburban savanna was a random collection of rotting mechanical debris. Old lawnmowers, decrepit appliances, and rusting car parts were strewn everywhere. The house had at one time been painted white, I think. But time, sun, dirt, wind, and neglect had given it a sickly, grayish-yellow skin, mottled and peeling everywhere. The storm door hung at an odd slant, held in place by one rusty hinge. While I was still trying to take it all in, my father-in-law turned to me and said cheerfully, “Well, this looks promising!” I checked in every direction, trying to identify anything that might fit his description. Promising? What, exactly, seems promising here? When he followed up with, “Let’s go in and take a look,” I began to wonder if he was delusional. A strong desire to protect this man from himself rose up in me. It didn’t seem possible that he could be seeing what I was seeing and still use the word promising . We walked up the grease-stained driveway to the tottering front door and my father-in-law gave it a good knock. I half expected the house to collapse in front of us. An older man, as dirty and unkempt as his surroundings, invited us in. I remember thinking he was just the kind of man you would expect to live in such a place. The inside of the house actually made the outside look pretty good. As I glanced about me, there seemed to be nothing that was clean and whole. Every inch appeared stained and dirty. Every corner seemed filled with junk. Every feature of the house looked to be damaged in some way. It was overwhelming. As we sat on a filthy, sagging couch in the middle of this broken- down house, that puzzling sentence kept echoing through my mind . . . Well, this looks promising! Emerging from my daze, I realized my father-in-law had actually begun to negotiate for
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