Someone lived here once.
Families were raised.
Gardens were grown.
Animals, pets and livestock, wandered about.
Clothes hung on the line.
There were children and lovers and hopes,
bright as sunflowers.

Once. Not now.

Now, the neglect has driven them all away.
What was it? Poverty?
What was it? Broken hearts and trauma?
Too much to survive?
Greener grass waved in front of them,
a temptress,
and no one left to fill the walls anew.
Eventually, always, an abandonment.

It’s a cute little house, well situated
in a post card colored field.
Still savable, but you have lived here long enough
to know how this story goes.

You have restored a few homes in your day,
brought then back from the brink,
none of them a perfect restoration. Few are.
But enough that there was life in them again.
Gardens and hopes bloomed anew
and the paint shown bright. The rot removed.
They became homes again,
not merely houses, waiting to fall.

But you cannot save them all.

It is the lesson you learned in your own restoration.
There is only so much of you
and you will use it as well as you are able.
restoring those closest to you
as you work on yourself.
It should be enough,

but still, you mourn.