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I often walk down Clayton Avenue toward Christ the King. There is an empty lot on the corner of 12th Avenue South where there are traces of a former cluster of homes - some concrete steps leading up to a patch of dandelions, a few bricks that look like they were once part of a backyard patio, a clump of crocuses just off a slight indentation in the dirt that might have once been a driveway.
As I cut across what is now a field of weeds, I find myself searching for other remnants of the houses that must have been there. I imagine people moving furniture in, celebrating birthdays and holidays, worrying over a bill, comforting a sick child, watching rain drip down the windows' panes, sitting around a dinner table talking, going to bed tired after a too-long day at work. Lives of joys and sorrows, one following after another, year after year, for the people who lived in those long gone houses.
The descendants of those people are possibly scattered across the country at this point - some may have no awareness of their connection to this corner, to the lives lived within those now ghost-like homes. Yet I smile at the thought of them and of the people who walked up those concrete steps, sat on that patio, planted that cluster of crocuses. I rejoice in the grand mixture of events and emotions that flowed through such lives and now touch my imagination. I give thanks for the Presence left behind.