It was a cast of hillbilly and redneck extras straight out of “Next of Kin,” hoopin’ and hollerin’, making a hell of a racket just outside my window. They were hurling hefty garbage bags into high-walled trailers attached to grandiose pick-up trucks. Some fool jumped up and down on top of the pile, trying to compress it, occasionally falling in while some other buffoons cackled. A loud, half-assed banging on a piano came through the walls, sounds barely rising above the bouncing of a box fan on the street, dragged by its power cord leash passed another doing wheelies in a wheelchair and others dragged other trophies across my front yard to another truck..

And a viscerally sickening feeling washed over me.

The home of the elderly couple had long ago began falling into disrepair. Their son, a good-natured veteran and a drunk, lived with them, as did his special needs son. The son did his best to help his parents; the grandmother home-schooled his kid. They were as isolated, private, and alone on the block as the rest of us.

In time, the grandfather became unaware, spending time in assisted living, and the grandmother became incapacitated. The son unexpectedly dropped dead one night; his son fetched groceries for his grandmother and accompanied her via car service or frequently by ambulance to her destinations. The dead son’s car was eventually tagged and towed away for sitting on the street too long. In time, the grandmother’s state became untenable and children’s services stepped in to place the boy. Then the rest unraveled as well with foreclosure, the contents of their lives abandoned.

The tail end happened during the first wave of COVID, and the house sat quietly for an eternity. Only recently, with the disease-inspired real estate craze, has activity picked up next door. Today, the clown-car equivalent showed up to empty the house of all its contents. Three or four trips to the dump later, the street was quiet again.

I sat in the world in between. I knew the family next door. I knew them as human beings. I knew what the house meant to them. I knew what the different items inside meant to them. And I saw the nose-picking baboons bouncing them down the driveway and across my yard, sifting through the spoils.

And I saw that those things, in the end, were just things, and that that, inevitably, is the fate of us all. It takes the greedy assholes to cast their home as an asset, the troop of hyenas to see a life’s accumulation as trash with hopefully a valuable find, and whatever other people with their own roles in the world and accompanying different views, to continue the cycle of life in the cul-de-sac.

Waking from an early sleep, I remembered to take the trash down to the curb. When I wake again, it’ll be gone.