I have no picture of it, this house. What I have now is a broad lot, captured all these years later on memory card by a friend. As I look at the picture of the lost lawn—between two bars, as it always ever was in my existence—I think I should have asked him why he took the picture.

The house at 425 Case Avenue in Mound City was the sole one on that street. It was the last of its kind. Sometime in the 1950s an entire slum of close-set houses was evacuated and demolished, so as to make room for the Biggest Fiberglass Plant ever—at least until China turns this statistic around.

The slum had been called “The Riverside Flats.” My father had grown up there. In its day, the slum had connected the lower east and north sides of the town. Full of the children of states’ immigrants—mostly from Pennsylvania and West Virginia—the houses sagged in tarpaper grace between closely-choking factory infernos. It was a place of obvious poverty and exclusion. Just as might be true in Brazil, the city’s toney mansions were within walking distance.

My father loved it. Years later, my parents would sit in the dark and smoke and drink a little, and reminisce. I recall now that our later suburban neighbors were concerned over this habitual darkness of our home. We should have been, as good citizens, burning the prime time oil, visible through a picture window obviously watching the picture window of television. I was told later, “We all wondered what you were doing over there.”

Reminiscing. You didn’t get my Dad going on this very often, but when you did, it was a ride. Tons of stories my mother had, of various qualities, but my dad was born raconteur. His swaths of raucous delinquency were only almost outdone by the fundament of his memory of comic books, bloody crime cases, and old radio plays.

To him, that slum was life as he knew it. Everything since had been diminished possibilities. He told me how his gang of boys would lug tires from the city dump to the top of North Buena Vista Street—the highest concrete point in the city—and then push them rolling through the busy traffic intersection far below. Not only had they done this, but the tires were first lit on fire.

Yes, your social objections are familiar to me. But compared to ripping off a clip into the joker who just stepped on your new shoes, poor people used to have more fun. He told me about the trips he had to make through the city graveyard to get to and from the cinema, and what a flavored task that became after seeing Frankenstein. The poor-peoples’ theater experience was rollicking enough—all the kids kept their feet tucked up on their seats so as not to obstruct the rats sweeping through the aisles.

When he returned home from the Marine hitch and the San Francisco hustle, he found his old neighborhood flattened. The OC plant divided the city corner and you could no longer sweep on through. The new interstate was busy clutching off the rest of the town. The city became a collusion of one-ways and dead-end streets, decimating avenues and walkways and commons. Mound City became user-unfriendly.

You grew up from the sixties knowing that you lived in a transfer station for the automobile. The Berlin Wall of the freeway obstructed local traffic as it facilitated federalized flow along and away from the old Erie Canal route. You were the halfway marker between Anywhere and Columbus, and not quite a direct one, either. We attracted Columbus’ serial killers and Cleveland’s jobless wanderers. But they were only passing through.

As dramatic as these highway bifurcations were, they were a small and pared-away facet of the ambitious über-plan. When I was twenty, I found a city planning document pushed back betwixt some books in the library, full of proposal maps and would-be shovel-ready projects. Had those civic shepherds had their way, had the money come through, the landscape would have been unrecognizable. It would have looked more like a space port as dictated by the head pizza cutter at Louie’s.

But those roads were still being negotiated when I came to be. My father found the only house not destroyed in the Riverside Flats clutch— 425 Case Avenue. We moved in.

It was a lonely house. Two bars sided it, a large yard shadowed by a giant cherry tree and a line of weeping-willows. In the back of the cherry tree was a tightly-wired grape arbor. Also a large shed—like the outbuilding of a farm, huddled by the impending block-house of the bar and the night shroud of the tree. My father opened his own casino in there. Seriously; he always wanted to run gaming. It thrived, with me as Jim Hawkins—a three year old with arms full of sweating Miller High Lifes and Pabts Blue Ribbons and Blatz, shunting between kitchen and casino.

“Don’t run!” my mother would warn.

I used to explore that shed. It smelled of yesteryear-summers’ dry grasses and abandoned locust carapaces. There were immortal canned preserves and beer sausages. Tins of paint, the sides covered with dry pallet putty. Flammable things.

One day somebody lit their Lucky and didn’t mind it. I saw the orange tornado form and the man in the blue-checked shirt scramble. They all ran, those hysterical cacklers, spilling cards and dice and the chips from the Tripoli pot. The shed burned brightly all night, like a new star in East, and the yard was full of rumbling red engines. There were no yellow plugs in the old Riverside Flats no-man’s-land. The pumpers pumped, but the shed was flattened: except for the brief charcoal scar, it was as if it had never been.

Drunks tended to come to our darkened evening door, insisting the Good Times should open its door to them. I remember my mother arguing often with faceless men, her voice ever more desperate. This is not the bar. I saw a lot of policeman some nights.

The house was ever more marked out once its shed shadow-twin vanished. It was a curious and House-of-Usher-looking thing, leaning slightly forward, wrapped and mummied in roofing tile. There was a back-hills look to it, a slightly demented expression on its uncertain façade.

I can remember back to when I was two. I remember the rooms when they seemed grandly and frighteningly cavernous. I can remember back to the point that my eyes were unable to focus in the entire room. At the ceiling edges, the lines fish-eyed and curved blurred.

I remember the rats. I have described them elsewhere. They were sly and quick and always followed along the wall. I saw several squeeze out from under the stove as it warmed for the dinner prep, and I watched them dispassionately. I remember the gray rat I found very nearly under my feet when I swung my legs over my baby bed, almost touching my toes down into the crimson pool and on to the furry gray carcass. I still don’t know how it died, though I suspect one of my cats had brought it as an offering.

There was that one night when I stood alone in the darkened kitchen and saw the rat-man’s head raise in the block of streetlamp light—the security lamp from the back-end of the Good Times. It was not an animal; it was anomalous. I screamed; it dashed away. My mother arrived to find nothing. But a frightening archetype had been presented, something to haunt my dreams and late-night thoughts thereafter.

My Dad rarely worked. He was always on strike from the failing Roper plant. He made odds and ends meet from antique-rustling. He sold off all of my Mom’s inherited objects—fuzzy-stringed violins and ancient frames. She even had a black-snake whip—? He dug out tin toys from farm mounds and would sell them for fifty dollars. I inherited this behavior, if no antiques.

I could tell you I loved this house, but I didn’t, exactly. It was just where I was. You often love places in retrospect. I had all my infant formative experiences there, including making my first moral decision—letting a praying mantis go after my father told me it would only die if I kept it. I had my first sexual experience there. I lost my first pet there. I read my first book there. You have whatever all that leaves you with.

We moved when I was four. And although I would sometimes become nostalgic for that back lawn which was as big as the universe, although I will always savor the Oz that I found when I squeezed through the grape arbor, I was happy to move throughout the world, to the ratless realms, to a place with more people—though I never got the knack of that people thing, exactly.

But its lonely vistas were also instructive. The crocuses-scored soundtrack over the hazy green hills, the woods I went into and pretended that I was Mowgli. Once my Dad and I wandered in the woods for hours. I got scratched from the weeds he carelessly whipped back. We discovered a gorgeous wooden house with an old couple in there, in the forest, beside the river that gave the Riverside its name. It was just like a fairytale. They gave me cookies and liniment for my scratches.

In the dark night I would stand at the windows and watch the steel pylons and steady lights of the OC. One night was so irrefutably hot, I lay sweating on the couch and uneasy. My father came home with a bag of cheese-powdered popcorn. It seemed blissful then, he home early in the early-morning, smelling of the shadow of beer.

Several years ago, I went back to 425 Case Avenue. I will borrow a phrase from a picture blogger (“Sweet Juniper”) who has offered the term “feral houses.” Feral is from ferra, “wild beast” but also, the bloggist notes, from “feralis” meaning “belonging to the dead.”

The house was now embraced to the quick by a tightening python of vines and smothering weedy bric-a-brac. The doors had split from the hinges and the windows had all been broken out. It had gone wild. I crept as close as the vegetative usurpers allowed. I did not try to get onto the porch where I had used to string blankets across as a mysterious play fort; it was of frightening dentition and clearly rotten.

At certain angles, I could see in. I said what they always say: How small it seems now. I can’t see how we ever lived there. It looked like something that had happened to somebody else. Something out of a story, yet not storybook.

I should have then grabbed a disposable at the drugstore and scribbled notes on silver halide before I returned to the north. Instead, I just looked on for awhile, and found my highway.

The next time I returned—five years?—it was gone. I felt the shock of the excluded. There was a flat spanse there, no indication that anything had ever stood there, that had held a family with children, cats and—yes, rats. It was as stamped down as any of the other thousand homes that are under the grand cemetery defined by the ever-smoking stacks of Owens-Corning. That feisty sole survivor, plowed under—as we shall all be, in time, time good and bad.

More conscious of mortality now—in that moody period before deathly skepticism scorns photographs as worthless—I wished I had that one picture. A photo of a homely house and its associated barbarity that I would only have shown my closest friends. I do not know why. They all say it is better to let things go.

But I know better.