Opinion/Your Turn: The unpleasant part of the journey

For the past 20 years, I have walked the same route on the border of Osterville and Centerville. A simple two-and-a-half-mile loop, it still takes my breath away, both with natural beauty and with hills that admittedly leave me gasping for air. I can often walk most of the route without sharing the road with a car, and seeing wildlife is almost always a guarantee.

My mother introduced me to “the Loop” when she and my father retired here in 2000. They embraced their lives in this new environment in different ways. My dad dug into keeping up the house and garden, while my mom was more interested in exploring their new neighborhood.

“You want to do the Loop?” she’d ask every time my wife and I would visit. When we did, we’d often have to ask her to slow down.

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The houses on the Loop are a major part of its appeal. The haves are positioned harmoniously next to the have-a-littles and each dwelling is so different from each other that nothing looks out of place. What all of these houses have in common is that they’ve all been kept up beautifully, with one growing exception.

In recent years one house, in Centerville, has fallen into such disrepair that it makes you feel like you’re in a post-apocalyptic zombie movie. And like those movies, the property produces the contradictory reactions of both wanting to fast-forward, but also to stop and stare at the grotesque intricacies. A field of ivy has taken over the driveway, annexing the garage and invading the house by way of the roof. Last September, Hurricane Ian felled an enormous European larch tree in the front yard, and there it remains, uprooted, not unlike a zombie carcass. But what’s most curious are the symbols of former prosperity: A Lexus SUV sits in the driveway next to a trailer with a jet ski on it. A thin coat of moss has begun to gather on both.

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Walking by this sad spectacle so regularly, and watching nature gradually assert itself over the years, my curiosity finally got the best of me, and I decided to dig into what happened. After making it her family’s home for 25 years, the previous owner sold the house to a developer in 2016, moving to North Carolina to open her own veterinary practice. She says her former neighbors occasionally send her photos of the old place and what the new owner hasn’t done with it.

“While it breaks my heart to know such a great house has been left to the elements,” she said, “someone, someday will come along and love it as much as we did.”

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The previous owner said they threw countless gatherings and painted the stucco exterior pink to bring “a snap of color to the neighborhood.” For the first 15 years of walking the Loop, when the house was still vibrant, I always looked forward to the group of dogs who would run onto the roof of the garage to bark hello as we passed. My parents would often time their Friday cocktails to the dogs’ daily barking when the owners would return home from work, the pups’ joy audible a half-mile away.

“I think they’re telling us we can have a drink now,” my mother would say.

My mother stopped walking the Loop with us a few years ago, as a rare neurodegenerative disorder gradually took all of her physical abilities away. The timeline of her own slow demise mirrored that of the ivy-besieged pink house. She died in August of 2021, and my father followed not long after. My brother has said that my dad also died on that day in August, but it took his body seven more months to go. His drive to keep up our house (and himself) had diminished, and the last months of life were a really unpleasant part of his journey. The proverbial long, cold, lonely winter was too long, too cold, and too lonely. This month marks a year since he’s been gone. He made it to March, less than two weeks shy of the first day of spring.

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Since my dad’s death I have found myself pausing even more at the abandoned pink house, the unpleasant part of my journey, to take it all in, and like a startling work of fine art, new details reveal themselves each time. But up the road and around the corner there’s another property that also makes me pause. Where the lawn meets the street, the owners have planted 32 little boxwood shrubs that barely come up to my knees. I know they’ll be taller and more vibrant each day I pass. When the journey grows unpleasant, know that it’s just part of the loop. Don’t stop walking, because around the corner there will always be signs of life.

Pat Healy lives in Centerville.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion: Abandoned Centerville house sparks memories of life gone by