If you'll recall.

It's been a month and no signs of - if you'll pardon the expression - life at the house.

My living neighbor received his mail by mistake: some utility bills and a letter from the Milwaukee PD which I assume was a copy of the police report of their removal of his body. A basement storm window was removed and left in my yard. The car I think was his seems to have been removed (legitimately, I hope).

I am left to ponder (which I would anyway, to be sure).

As mentioned in this space before, I have a lot of crap stored in my basement - the detritus of four decades on this planet. Most, if not all, of it means something only to me, and even then not much. Most of those boxes haven't been opened in years.

I've been peripatetically trying to weed through those boxes, spurred in part by familial sense of impending mortality, in part by spousal disapproval. I don't want to make my kids go through this crap after I leave this lonely granite planet.

Which is maybe why I feel such concern for my deceased neighbor's own crap. Even if it was simple laziness that led him to leave his Christmas tree up in his living room window for the entire time I've lived here, even if it was some sort of minor personality disorder that led him to collect discarded junk from the alleys around the city, it was still his stuff, hoarded and saved for some purpose known to him.

To that end, it seems to me as if his life's imprint here is about to disappear forever, to nobody's particular remorse.

And that makes me sad.

As a lay-Buddhist, I am striving to recognize and live the idea that, to quote Elvis Costello, we're only here in this instant. But it still makes me sad.