E Ellis Allen (girlonstilts.com)

A little white house with fish scale shingles running down its gables sits on the corner overlooking the Salt Lake Valley. It is a Victorian style complete with a turret, lead-etched windows and a dark wooden door inlaid with glass.
The house is situated on a pie-shaped lot so that the front porch faces the point. English boxwoods outline the lawn and stripe the ash washed fence separating the front yard from the back.
I noticed the house years ago because among the economic-sized Colonials and modified Cape Cods, its Victorian lines and roof points stuck out like a prominent nose. I liked it.
Sometimes on my morning walks, I take my psycho-puppy off our regular loop and lead her down one side of the house and then the other. I don’t know why.
For the past ten months, a For Sale sign has swung from real estate gallows pounded in the house’s front yard. It’s a lovely house, and I was sure someone would snatch it up quickly. But no one had.
Over the last year, I’d walk by it, sometimes twice a day, and it became a beacon of sorts—the little white house left vacant on the corner—as if it waved at my little black dog and me as we passed, “Come buy me! Come buy me!” it’d say.
Yesterday morning, the puppy and I hurried by it once more. Dark gray clouds were gathering in the sky, and the temperature fell. The route by the Victorian happened to be the swiftest way home before it rained.
I noticed a U-haul in the driveway pinned between a jeep with Colorado plates and a two-car garage packed to the ceiling with cardboard boxes. The For Sale sign was pulled, and the hole plugged with sand.
The empty house was no longer that. And then I realized the little white house wasn’t mine anymore.