One by one they disappear.  Dilapidated.  Empty.  Destroyed.  Only air drifts through their shells like wisps of smoke from a dying fire.  Only memories race inside my head of what used to be.

I watch the houses of friends in the neighborhood by city hall slowly go away.  I noticed today a house across from Office Depot is now boarded up, part of the roof missing and gone, the home ready for destruction.  I played there.  I was in that house hundreds of times.  I had dinner there, swam in a pool in the back yard where I heard horror stories of children drowning in larger pools.  I was probably eight or nine. 

One family I knew lived there.  They moved and another moved in.  We knew them too.  I grew up with their children.  That house was on the back side of some other friends house which sat across from city hall where our house used to be.  We would climb the fence in the back yard into the other yard and get yelled at by parents.  Or we could walk around the U-shaped street and spend an extra four minutes walking. 

As these homes disappear to make way for progress, memories of days past flash through my mind.  Only I will remember what happened in those empty lots when I was young.  At some point in the future, perhaps I’ll stand at such-and-such longitude and latitude which corresponds to the location of those old homes and find myself inside a mall, a restaurant, a parking lot or a business.  Who knows? 

The strange thing is the sensation of knowing what used to be and what will be in the future.