Housing shortage for Ghosts

Everyday you pass these modest forty- and fifty-year-old houses that blend in with their surrounding shrubbery and huge trees. A week later, there is a gaping swarth of land and you wonder what happened to the house and its landscaping. The only thing that's left is the asphalt or concrete driveway. The fabric of the manicured street now has a hole in it. In a few weeks, stacks of lumber and cement blocks line one side of the property. You know that a house twice the size of the old one will soon dwarf the remaining modest homes in the neighborhood.

It's a scene that is replayed too often in the city's modest neighborhoods. There may be a housing downturn in other parts of the country, but not here.

It's sad that no one apparently wants to take an older home and remodel it. I know a house is just mortar, brick and clapboard. But there is an ambiance to old homes that speaks to those of us who love history.

I remember going into a house, built in the 1850s, that had been remodeled into a shop on the ground floor with living quarters on the second floor. Pieces of history still lived in that house, including a ghost. The owner told me that two rooms on the second floor were always dust free and neat, no matter how messy the rooms had been left the previous evening.

Houses have to live long enough to collect ambiance or friendly spirits. And I still want to borrow that ghost.