Tearing Down the House

As I try to concentrate on my notes for the conference this weekend, I am feeling very distracted. The post below explains one of the reasons, and I thought that if I wrote about it, I could perhaps better focus on my work at hand:

This post has nothing to do with genealogy, although I suppose it is history-related. I awoke this morning to the sound of heavy equipment tearing down the house across the street, one home west of mine. I started to watch for a few minutes, but I had to turn away. There's something extremely saddening about watching what was once a home for many people over the last century be reduced to a pile of lumber. When I researched the history of my own home, I ended up researching most of the homes on this block, so I feel like I have a personal investment in this neighborhood, as old and as tired as it may be. That structure was built in 1918, and for the past 89 years, people have eaten, slept, laughed, cried, argued, loved, and perhaps been born or even died in that house. I was only in it a few times; but when they were younger, my kids played over there with the children who lived there for a short while, and loved exploring the "secret" back stairway. It's a shame nobody bought it and moved it to another lot here in town. A little run-down from years of neglect, there was nothing that a new roof, some fresh sod, and a little TLC wouldn't have fixed. Now, there will be a parking lot, expanded from the KFC down at the corner. My digital camera isn't working right now, so I can't post a photo of the destruction; I did find one taken several years ago on the county assessor's site: