One of my favorite poems is “The House With Nobody In It.” It’s about an abandoned farm house in Suffern, NY - a tiny New England village, incorporated in 1796, just 31miles northwest of Manhattan. General George Washington is said to have used a home there as headquarters when he was in the area.
The poem was written by Joyce Kilmer in 1914. During his brief life Kilmer had other jobs besides being a poet. He was a journalist and even a “definition writer” for Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of the English Language. Three years after he wrote my favorite poem, in April 1917, he enlisted and was deployed to Europe to fight in WWI.
He would not survive - killed-in-action in France by a German sniper’s bullet on July 30, 1918. He was just 31 years old.
Kilmer is best known for another poem - “Trees.” At some point in school, you may have even memorized the first line of that one: “I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.”
But I love “The House With Nobody In It.” There’s an old, abandoned house near Wimberley. I drive by it almost every day. And every time I can’t help but look over at this house with nobody in it. I don’t think of it as haunted, or broken down or abandoned. It just seems lonely.
The window glass has been broken, so it can’t see out so clearly anymore. The porch is old and sagging. Weeds and grass have grown up around it. Blown up against the sides of the house, discarded trash from the nearby busy road tells of the life that is passing it by. It needs to be fixed up. But what it needs most of all is people living inside.
I wish I knew who had lived there. I wish I had the money to buy it. I’d like to see it the way it used to be. Maybe I’d even find a busy, happy family and give them the house.
That house had a past where it did what a house is supposed to do - hold a family and keep them safe. And, open its doors to let them out into the countryside. Maybe there were babies there once and then wild, adventurous kids. A doorway marked with the record of growing children. Now it just seems sad. . . left alone. It feels like a house with a broken heart.
(Don Minnick is a clinical psychologist and organizational consultant and the author of books linked to business and the arts. He has found a home in the creative and culturerich Wimberley valley. He is a Board Member of Wimberley Arts.org. djmminnick@ gmail.com)
