Today I took a road less traveled on the outskirts of our town and passed Vanna's house. Vanna and I used to work together. Ten years ago in the space of a few months, Vanna's mother, a son, a grandchild and a sister all passed away and Vanna became morose. She chain smoked and drank when she wasn't working. She died suddenly of a heart attack, but I think it was more from heartbreak.

Today when I passed her house I barely recognized it. I backed up and parked across the road from the house. Her house has a long front porch and she would hang hummingbird feeders and ferns and other plants along the length of the porch, and had a bird seed feeder out front. She loved her birds and plants and took pride in showing everything to me when I visited.

The place is barely recognizable now. Ten years of overgrowth and underbrush have hidden the lower part of her house. A gnarly branched tung tree with pinkish flowers was growing at one end of the house in thick sedge grass. On the other end, a wisteria vine as thick as an arm was growing over the roof and around the windows in a tight embrace. Through the undergrowth I could see a red rose in bloom, strangled by weeds. A dead pecan tree with grayish black skeleton limbs hung over the roof. Her house looked like what it is--unloved and uncared for; derelict and deserted and dreary.

Vanna has brothers and sisters, children, grandchildren, and cousins galore. I wonder why some of them, one of them, didn't move in and keep the house up. I thought of Vanna and hoped somehow she knew that I remembered her and was thinking of her today.

susil