The ghost sometimes popped right out of the roof like it was not there, like it was the ghost.  We all saw it, all the neighbors.  He was from that first house that died.  He was haunting a ghost himself.  

As a boy I saw orange groves in rows in parts of this valley. They were surrounded by gas stations, convenience stores, fast food chains, all encroaching. The motels strung along Sepulveda blvd as well as parts of Balboa were to me just ugly boxes. I later would learn that in some people did illegal things. I later than that would learn in a book that those motels were there as artifacts from when a few streets stretched across this valley connecting Los Angeles and the Central valley. As a little boy I apparently hated parking lots. I have no memory of this,  I have lived my whole life in the north valley.     That house is haunted.   We all on the street know this.   The family is nice and seem to not notice or care.  The weird young man they let illegally live in the attic seems to also not care.   My wife and I get a strange feeling though when we see him.  Ethan is the name we hear them call him.  

The first house was gone before I was born.  They buried the couple in the back yard.   He still looks for her though.  She died mysteriously while preparing a bath the old newspapers said.  Here is how I picture him floating around looking for her in my best I can do in sketch up software.

T
  If the ghost haunts a previous house it is haunted something we cannot even see as the living right?   That poor guy we all see sometimes in the house at the top of the street here like it is not even there.  He never seems to hear the endless dripping sounds and fall of his wife who apparently died years before him in the 1920's.  She is sounds now.  He is a body that can move lost and sad through walls.   I am just a neighbor now recently retired.

built it...and they will come....and it will then cease to exist under the new thing

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mapping of what is no more...measure and erasures

Follow me along this musty hall and we head toward the darker corner where
some older lights still flicker and glimmer....it is faint but has been
constant...some are quite old now..He is collecting stories of people who failed but somehow were remembered.
The clippings are yellow as leaves of odd people who in some way managed
to fail at life but be remembered for something, some quirk , some thing
they made in the yard and did not throw away. He is not a swimmer. He is
not a businessman. He does not act on stage. He is not doing any of the
things he was �gmeant�h to do. He hopes against hope. He is walking into
a crowd and seems to almost disappear. Almost.

no more

As a boy I raced my brother within the orange groves. His motor was faster off the line and he hummed ahead while my body rattled behind. We ducked low branches and at times almost fell avoiding fallen oranges from the trees, their bodies soft and pungent geometry amidst the din. It was wondrous even then to ride along the edges of the past, of what once was, of the stories my father and grandfather had told me of decades before.

My father told me of the groves spanning miles in all directions in the 1950's of his youth, of bodies dumped where no one of the city or emerging suburban gird seemed to dwell by a criminal element seeing the groves as a shadow across the land beyond Los Angeles. He also told me of how the central valley did not seem so far away then and how the first kiss under a shade tree smelling sweet was almost in its own place beyond that afternoon and all the details scattered waiting a few miles away.

Erasers tend to grind down an image but not to completely wear it away. Something always would remain, a trace, a smudge, an outline. I have somewhere in a bag amidst old books a collection of pictures I tried to wipe clean with the good old "pink pearlie". They almost look like maps, maps of what is not, measure left to shapes , outlines, gaps, and the desire to peer in at what is no more.