From afar you could already sense it: the house as we knew it was missing its face. The wall behind the front porch, formerly so bland and inscrutable, was now completely down, as if violently blown out from within. The second story stood intact, and the sides and back of the house looked the same as ever, but the first-floor wall facing the street had somehow belched out its contents onto the front lawn. The porch and grass were layered thick with detritus. Coming closer, I saw piles of Coke bottles, empty pizza boxes, flimsy commercial packaging, old plastic bags, all heaped with much else amid the rubble of the plaster walls. Through the mounds of trash, you could also see a broken line of framing across the rupture: apparently, the second story had collapsed into the first. Had the man who lived there never thrown out his garbage? It looked like the daily waste of many years, all stored up within but gradually gathering weight, oppressing the weakened floor and leaning into the moldering outer wall. The ribs of the house could only contain that growing pressure for so long.

Who was I to judge this man?