The Silken Tent
My Letter to the World
May 2000

May 9, 2000
Tuesday

Years of therapy have yet to answer definitively the question of why I am drawn to other people’s lives, why I gaze into a lighted window at night and wonder at the relationships played out behind the sheer curtains, why I walk in graveyards and draw conclusions about kinship and status from the names and the dates and the decorations on the stones. Perhaps it’s something akin to what Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote,

     I measure every Grief I meet
     With narrow, probing, Eyes --
     I wonder if It weighs like Mine --
     Or has an Easier size ...
           -- (J561)

Whether it’s a means of gauging the degree of my own peculiarities, or just the method of a born fiction writer, I’ve always taken something like a news report or a direct observation and wondered about “the rest of the story.” What led to this? How did the people feel? What happened afterward?

Last week, in the next township east of where I live, a 91-year-old woman died. She was living with other family members in a house not unlike mine. In fact, her house was built by the same developer who built mine, in the neighborhood he was just finishing as Bradley Drive was being carved out of Reichert’s field.

So far, the story is unremarkable. Elderly people frequently die in their own beds, of natural causes, having lived out their days in the home of a child who herself might be at the doorway of her own declining years. I would not even be aware of this event if not for the brief story in the “Police Roundup” in today’s newspaper.

Funeral personnel called to the home on the morning of the death found unsanitary conditions caused by the presence of at least 70 cats in the house. Animal waste littered the house and its concomitant odor permeated the air. A few days later police and health code officers inspected the property and Humane Society workers began removing the
cats. During the rescue operation, the homeowner made some cleanup efforts by pouring liquid bleach on the basement floor. The bleach reacted with the residual ammonia from the cat waste and released noxious fumes which made complete evacuation necessary.

Results of an autopsy have not been released, but the death is being investigated by police as being related to inadequate care and unsanitary conditions.

The circumstance revealed here, while tragic, is not all that rare. From time to time in the last year there have been revelations of similar scenarios throughout the region involving cats, dogs, even horses. Generally, these neglected animals are found in rural situations --
old houses hidden down a country lane behind overgrown trees, ramshackle outbuildings in a forgotten corner of a subdivided tract.

This story caught my attention because of the address. It’s in a neighborhood called “Olde Colonial Village,” (the addition of that “e” allows the developer to charge about $5000 more per house) where the streets are all named for “olde” American settlements -- Mystic, Nantucket, Salem, Plymouth, none of which is in Pennsylvania. And of course, it’s not really a village, with a common grazing meadow and a town center for shops and services. It’s just a hundred houses on four streets that form a little pocket off the main north-south artery that runs parallel to and about six miles east of the north-south road that my neighborhood pockets out from.

On my way to get Lynn this afternoon I took a side trip to see if I could figure out which house “in the 4400 block” of the street named was the House of Cats. Before my turn into the Village was completed I knew. Four houses down I could see water sparkling on the roadway and yellow Do Not Cross tape billowing out from stakes that were planted
around the perimeter.

The house, indeed, looks just like mine, or could. The developer has been using the same three floor plans for thirty years now, shrinking or expanding the square footage and varying the exterior materials and the roof line and the angle of the garage approach. This one appears to be a basic four-bedroom with first floor family room, fireplace, two-car
garage, and wrap-around porch. It’s between a similar model with a handsome stone front and one in the less popular story-and-a-half Cape Cod style with brick front and second floor dormers.

There is something about the House of Cats, however, especially when viewed as part of a pleasant suburban neighborhood, that just doesn’t look right. The siding is an odd minty-green which has faded unevenly. The windows need to be painted, and the garage door frame sags. The shrubs are leggy and the lawn is weedy and dotted with dandelions gone to fuzz, in sharp contrast to the lush green swath of grass and trimmed hedges of both its neighbors. The driveway appears never to have been sealed or otherwise maintained and has gone almost to pebbles. There’s a wreath on the door, with a township building inspector’s notice now taped to it.

The houses on either side are no farther away than they are in my neighborhood -- about 20 feet or so on either side. Surely there was some inkling about what was going on within. And yet I think of my own neighborhood. I like to think we’re close-knit, but in reality I’m on more-or-less intimate terms only with a few families whose children are
about Lynn’s age, and cordial speaking terms with others. I have a nodding acquaintance with some who have been here as long as I have or who are regular early-morning walkers.

I know very little about anybody else. In fact, the only reason I know the names of the couple who bought “Straubs’ old house” on the west side of mine is because we once mistakenly received their church envelopes, and I noticed that the man had the same name as a TV doctor of the 1960s. That, and the fact that they don’t keep after their dandelions the way the Straubs did.

There might be a dozen cats in there. Or a dozen 19th-century album quilts. Or a dozen sorrows I could help to relieve, a dozen joys I could help to celebrate. Knowing myself, and the ways of neighborhoods like ours these days, I’ll be wondering at least a dozen more years.

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