The house next to my dilapidated shed

The dilapidated shed next to my house is losing its footing one rotten beam after another. Some evenings you hear a dull thud, or when you open the back door you wonder why it keeps on catching, until you see the tell-tale rotten wood-piece dropped just outside. It’s even gone as far as to lose one of its upright supports that just gently tipped my way when I leaned the mop against it.

Apart from its decaying beam-structure, and in some places sagging roof, the space underneath this shed is also not the most catching of working areas. Most of the materials being salvaged from other areas of the shed it stands around in partial stages of disintegration and decay, waiting to one day be moulded into something more useful. These “treasures” as I like to refer to them includes a half-rotten white door (potentially a nice wooden table), a turned over bath-tub that weighs so much we can’t move it, a 1.5x1.5 m picture frame, a tarred tree stump, some tiles, a work-bench covered in candle wax, a couple of cabinets in an odd assortment of colours full of equipment and some more odds and ends I would never get rid of just because of their potential to become something great. And over all of this there rest a layer of dust so thick it clearly indicates the absence of any workman.

The space under the shed have also temporarily been divided by a crude washing-line stretched between some up-rights, a table and the workbench, with washing hanging at odd angles from the a- an descending lines. Sometimes the shed houses spiders and most probably snakes, but most of the time it is refuge to colonies of lizards and other crawling and creeping wonders.

You can see the shed from the bumpy and ditched road as you come up to the house or pass it. And if you do not know there is a house next to it, you might even miss the house. But you know what, when you come home late at night and the moon is up or the sky is full of stars and the air is crisp, you don’t see the shed, and it’s presence or the menacing danger of falling sponge-wood becomes a non-reality, and you don’t mind the shed next to your house. And then you always ask yourself, what if it wasn’t there?