Villa Villekulla

People who know about awesome books will recognize this post title as the name of Pippi Longstocking's house. (Never read Pippi Longstocking, or any of the assorted books featuring her? Do so immediately. Or better yet, read them to an 8 year old. I promise my non-existent money that they will like it.) Anywho, the reason I called this post Villa Villekulla is 1) because I thought my grandmother would like it, since she's the one that read Pippi Longstocking to me (hi Mormor!), 2) because Pippi's house had personality, in that the windows sometimes looked like eyes, and 3) because I saw the weirdest/saddest house today, window-eyes and all.

I have been out of town for a few days, and was walking to the grocery store this morning, and went by a row of rowhouses, of which there are many about these parts. There must have been a fire in one, because the windows on the first two floors were all boarded up. I truthfully would not have noticed this, probably, except that people were standing on the other side of the street, staring. So I stopped, and here is why they were staring: the back of the house must have been knocked off or demolished, and so on the top floor just the front brick facade of the house was left, and you could see the sky through the unboarded windows. It totally looked like some surrealist painting, or this amazing photo that my friend Karen took a few years ago in Geneva:
It looked like one of those fake houses you see in old Westerns, where it's a cardboard front that has been propped up. And that is what it invokes: ghost towns, decay, blight. All while the sky shimmers through the gaping windows and light bounces off the charred bricks.

I've been thinking about houses/apartments quite a bit lately, and one of my favorite procrastination games is to think about what photos I've taken that I want to blow up and frame when I have a place of my own. I tried to find out more about this fire, but couldn't (even the internetz failed me). And then I started to think: these houses are all connected, so were the other residences ok? How many people lived in it? How long had they lived there? What did they lose? Are they all unscathed? Why did the fire start? Or really, was it even a fire? Was it just demolished in a non-malevalent way? And chances are good I will never know, since the records have already faded away, if they ever existed. Which is odd, since it's only 3 blocks from my apartment. Sometimes I forget how many people are in such a small radius...and how many of those people I will never meet, or even see.

To add to the uncertainty, I just tried to find out the origin of the phrase "the eyes are the windows to the soul," and I can't find that out, either. Guesses seem to range from the Bible to Immanuel Kant, to Cicero, to Arabic proverbs. If anyone knows, do tell me. :)