I found it walking the woods near my home, ruin rather than a house. Trees had taken root close by, one just in front of the door or where the door had been. Fragments of glass crusted the steel window sash that remained, wood gone black and soft with years open to weather at the sills. There was no sign of access or even a path to the road maybe a quarter mile in. They’d built with what could be carried there, the roof form poorly matched to New England’s climate and the scale of the place, all bat wing and shoulder —a butterfly roof— I think that’s the architectural term. Trapped water pooled. Rafters rotted through. It felt dangerous, stepping inside. The walls defaced with spray-painted names, lewd drawings, empty bottles scattered about signaled trespass had become common. There was a small space open to the sky in the center of this house. It wasn’t much larger than my arms outstretched. The splay of low bending rooves all sloped toward this tiny atrium from where the house seemed to push the surrounding woods away from itself, from this place at its center. Several pine seedlings sprouting there from the mulch of fallen flattened leaves and black earth. Their tender barky shoots curving close to the ground, the slight spray of needles —luminous, blue green. I wondered then which of them, if any, would survive.