There's a couple of themes I return to, over and over, if I were to write.

One of them is place or things. I might be sitting in my comfy chair in the living room of Duplex, Grace at my feet, watching TV or reading a book, surrounded by my "things" - and I'll think 'what was this same room like fifty years ago?' Who occupied these rooms, and what did they see when they looked out the window, what world view did they have and how was it different than what we, or maybe I, have come to know of the world in 1959? Or of 1929, of 1985? Of 1974?

In the last six years, I've uncovered snippets of the past. A long-time owner was a City of Dayton Housing Inspector. His mother lived on my side, and later tenants told me the laborious task of removing layer upon layer of wallpaper scraped from walls and ceilings. When I updated the kitchen and stripped back the intervening years, hints of the original room showed it had a stove with a stovepipe and an oilcloth for the floor.

What was cooking like for the Dayton Housing Inspector and his mother? How about the people who occupied the place when it was new in 1919? I imagine, romantically, hardscrabble Depression-era cooking on a cast iron stove, a toasty room filled with the smells of potatoes and beans and the gossip of friends and relatives pulling together and making the best out of what they have.

But maybe it wasn't like that at all. Maybe it housed alcoholics or men who beat their wives or a sad history of miscarriages, failed marriages or business ventures.

Sometimes the snippets come in the form of objects left behind.

The Fireman, when he left next door, left tons of stuff. It was if he never washed any of his clothes (although I could hear the washer / dryer going constantly) and used the basement as a trash pit. Perfectly good clothes, and not dirty at all. Bundled up, they made for a nice Charitable Deduction for the Landlord.

Some things he left behind: A little pencilled drawing on a dark piece of cardboard in a cheap frame, Micky Mouse playing the piano to Minnnie. It's an old-fashioned, Steamboat Willie Mickie, with a long nose and legs and two ovals on the front of his shorts, and Minnie sits on top of the piano wearing a little dress and high-heeled booties. As notes came out of the piano, they expand like balloons as they float further away and Minnie is popping one of the furthest ones ("Bang!") with a pin.

Scrolled in angles along the border at the bottom: To / Miss Fletcher / From /Kathleen / Dtd / Mar 11, 1934.

Who was she, Miss Fletcher or Kathleen? What was the occasion? Was this drawing the memory of a cartoon matinee, or a complete imagination? Who were they in relation to my Tenant The Fireman?

And why did he leave it behind?

Another item: A paint-by-numbers painting in dark greys and blues, a ship at high seas, cresting a wave, in full sail against a sworling of full clouds through which just a peak of the moon (but maybe the sun?). A glint of red in the lanterns on deck, a glint of red from their reflection on the waves. The paint applied thick, thickly, the paint showing the direction the last strokes had been made, with the matte paints struggling to take a two-dimensional image come alive (and not quite succeeding).

The painting stood out in a high seas of discarded or broken brooms and the like, a storm of their own, and when I picked it up, the flimsy narrow frame split away, revealing a narrow border of brighter colors hidden from the years of nicotine. I soaked the painting in a bucket of ammonia, to bring back the color, but the paper canvas began to disintegrate, the tossing ship damaged with pinpoints of mush, drying on the back of a chair. Who painted this? The same Miss Fletcher or someone connected to her? The Fireman, or how many generations earlier?

Some basis for a story / stories.