I Lived. I Existed. I Wrote A Report About Sedimentary Rocks...

Photo By John Hoff 

Some weeks ago, I may have become the first employee of the "ad hoc but red hot" NoMi organization, when I was paid a small sum of money to get a house "trashed out" for a home tour that was happening in, oh gee, a few hours. Going through the house, I found remnants of the people who lived there prior to foreclosure. In an upstairs bedroom was...

...a poster which looked like some kind of exhibit for a junior high school science project. The poster was leaned against a wall, carefully and deliberately, and left behind. It was almost like a message to whoever would come along to clean out the house, or live in it:

I lived here. I attended school. I wrote a report about sedimentary rocks. THIS WAS MY BEDROOM AND I LIVED HERE DOING MY SCHOOLWORK.Who are YOU? Who are you to be here inside MY ROOM?

Admiring the science project, I thought how some little girl spent time and effort to create it. Well, now the precious science project was just another piece of trash to clean up.

But before I got rid of the poster board, I snapped a picture. I wanted to memorialize it, somehow, the fact somebody lived here and--in those last moments, before the very end--it seemed like in a very deliberate way they left something precious behind as a marker and a message.