that brown house

We had just finished ripping down the last of the cardboard that was mysteriously nailed all over the ceiling and walls in the garage, when a woman walking her dogs stopped at the front of the driveway.

Her name, we found out, was Martha, and she had lived in this house when she was growing up, in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Her grandparents lived next door, and she still lives in the neighborhood a few blocks away.

Her father, it turned out, had put up the cardboard, so he could use the garage as a darkroom.  He had also put up the fiberglass awnings over the front and back doors and had built some of the fences.