Continuing the Widow's Son's recent lament about the demise of civility in our society, I need to vent a bit about recent events at our house-- the 150+ year old place we're renovating before we move in later this spring. Obviously, since we haven't moved in yet the place sits vacant much of the time; my dad has been popping over to do work a couple days a week and I'm there during the day most weekends, but otherwise our house sits there by itself, waiting until we can make it a home again.Arriving the other morning, my dad noticed some tire tracks in the fresh snow at the end of the driveway, and then he noticed some footprints leading over to our rented dumpster. There isn't anything in there but old plaster & linoleum, so there wasn't really anything in the way of treasure for our dumpster diver to claim.
Maybe he (or she) was mad about that, and maybe that's why they decided to steal the birdhouses and thermometer that had been left around the yard by the previous owner.
Really, dumpster diver, the 30 year old cheap plastic thermometer and the birdhouse made out of an elbow of stove pipe?!
I don't care about the purloined items themselves; they probably would have made their way into the dumpster eventually anyway... but that's not the point. What have we come to when my immediate reaction isn't indignation, but relief that they didn't steal our flag or our snowblower instead?
Was the junk in our yard stolen out of spite? Was it taken by a kleptomaniac? I just don't understand. The only remotely reasonable scenario I've been able to come up with is that perhaps it was a relative of the woman who lived there for so long, who took those items in a fit of nostalgia (really? The plastic thermometer?!) and even that is upsetting, because all they had to do was stop by one day when I'm there and ask.
From now until we move in, a little voice in the back of my head will be wondering how long it will be before we show up one day and find the place broken into, or worse.
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