"Do you wanna see the house?" my mother asked me. Just a quarter mile before the turn off 118. She didn't say "old" because it hadn't been sold yet, but I noticed that she didn't say "our house" - just "the" - as if to imply some greater, unspeakable meaning, like a place in history, or the scene of a crime, or a haunted estate where people only visit to feel some brief presence of a past life or the hope of a life past this one.