Things I Found in Other People's Houses

A shoebox under the bed in a house in Dayton. Inside: $4,200 in twenties, a passport expired in 1987, and a handwritten list of twelve names with no explanation. The family recognized three of them.

A kitchen drawer — the third one down, the one that always sticks. A savings bond from 1979. Face value $50. Current value when we finally cashed it: $318. The family used it to pay for lunch after the closing.

A coat in a hallway closet that hadn’t been worn in years. In the pocket: a key on a plain metal ring, no label. We never found what it opened. The daughter kept it anyway.

A voicemail saved on a landline answering machine. The family didn’t find it for six weeks because nobody thought to check. It was from the deceased — left two days before he died. He was calling to remind himself to buy milk.

A business card tucked inside a Bible. On the back, in faded pencil: call him if anything happens. The number was disconnected. The name on the card was a lawyer who had retired in 2004.

A refrigerator with six months of groceries still on the calendar door. Every week, the same items. Every week, the same handwriting. The last entry was a Tuesday.

I’ve been keeping a list of these for years. Not because they’re strange — most of them aren’t, really. But because every one of them is a small window into how someone actually lived, versus how their family thought they lived.

Those are almost never the same thing.

— Martin, Cincinnati OH