Nonfiction | October 07, 2026

A House in the Woods  

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 2013 

Little house in the woods. The phrase is so pastoral it almost yawns. But that’s what it turns out to be: two stories of stained wood and windows that look out upon an iced-over creek, Gothically barren trees, and old tractor parts rusting along the fence line.  

 I arrive late and miss the turn before doubling back to find a slit in the brush marked by a rusted mailbox. Driving up the claustrophobic path, gravel and ice crackling beneath the tires, I lurch the car along slowly, uncertainly, like a detective approaching a crime scene at the beginning of a mystery. It’s easy to imagine someone watching from the dark.  

When the house comes into view, something flickers at the edge of my vision. My breath catches, but it’s only a deer snuffling through a garbage can. He doesn’t freeze in the headlights but instead turns and hurries away in elastic leaps. 

The house, too, has a fled-from quality. I’ve rented it from a woman on Craigslist, and I imagine the sparse and haphazard furnishings still hold the shape of her divorce. Some cupboards are empty. Others hold collections of mismatched cups and plates. In one drawer, I find a child’s drawing of a horse that’s been folded in half, tucked away and then forgotten. Other curiosities abound. In the closet of the child’s room—a boy’s, judging by the superheroes painted on the walls—I find tubs of Legos and action figures. Did he outgrow them? Was he forced to choose what to leave behind when he and his mother moved away?  

Upstairs there’s a canopy bed that feels extravagant in the otherwise empty room. Why take the other furnishings but leave the bed? Was it an act of symbolic pride, a way for each to show the other how firmly they wanted to leave the marriage behind? Likely, the concerns were more practical. Too hard to move. Takes up too much space. Whatever the case, I sleep easily in what they’ve left behind.  

When the light wakes me at dawn, I get up to shade the windows and find there isn’t a single curtain left hanging in the house. I walk through the rooms again, puzzling over hooks in the ceilings where the plants once hung, bath toys tucked away beneath a dripping sink. In one closet, I find a man’s jacket, a receipt crumpled in the pocket. I flatten it on the kitchen table and stand there, trying to discern what it’s for, but then a deer flickers outside the window. A doe, tail raised, the breath from her nostrils visible in the cold. I watch her watching me, and this allows me, for an instant, to see myself from the outside: a man standing in someone else’s kitchen, in his underwear, trying to decode a meaningless receipt.  

 What exactly am I doing? What am I looking for? What life have I come here to reclaim?