There is a large house, a mansion you might call it, toward the top of a hill where I go cycling not far away.  It was built within recent memory, an ostentatious castle of a structure, grandly landscaped, such that a neighbor once shared a speculation that something was buried beneath a certain mound toward its rear.  Its steep lines and broad turret tower over the last ramps of the hill I climb.  Its high walls are faced with stone.

During a recent storm a strong wind came through along with driving rains and thunder and lightning.  Great oaks were toppled, downing lines.  The master of the great house was electrocuted when he came out of his front door to put out the fire caused when power lines fell on his Maserati.  Two weeks afterward, the burnt Maserati is gone, but for some charred remains, a strip of burnt metal lies on the stone driveway before the front door of the house, a used fire extinguisher, its own bright red burnt off by fire, nearby, and not far away, the remnants of a street lamp, the cut off metal glass encased bulb end at the foot of a new stained pine timber utility pole freshly planted.

Further up the side street there are two freshly sawed smooth oak stumps of grand size still with the odor of sawdust.  I pulled aside one of them, the further one, leaned over from my bicycle and counted the growth rings from the center out to the thick bark.  Roughly seventy, upon a patient counting, very close to the years of the deceased owner of the castle-like mansion and the Maserati.