Read a portion of "California Rental" from An Inside Passage by Kurt Caswell:

"Late summer blackberries are gone now. The vines have drawn their juices in. And the sunburned grass is oak-leaf strewn, brittle to my every step. Yellow jackets (people here call them “meat bees”) cluster like crabs between the window and the screen. And in this stillness waiting, it rains the first rain in weeks on the hour of the equinox.

I walk outside my rented house in the southern Cascade Mountains of northern California, inspecting the ground for black bear tracks near the woodpile; I thought I heard footsteps in the night. I find no bear sign in the rained-fresh earth but there, where reflected light redirects my eye, a small red toy car. I pick it up. It is dense and boxy, foreign and artificial. Who was the child who dropped this here? How long ago? Mother calling? Or haphazardly in pursuit of something else? What life passed through this place in a time just beyond my reach?

These past days since we moved in, my wife and I have unearthed artifacts of other lives, signs of the people who have lived in this house. In the attic storage space I finger thin clay shards scattered on the floor, a potter’s fractured labor. A penny in the grass is a hole in someone’s pocket? A forgotten box of cat litter (still sporting that smell) beneath the lip of the back deck. We find so much of those who came before it seems the house resists our getting too settled too soon.

Suzanne and I married just days ago. It was a small ceremony in Orofino, Idaho, at my parents’ house overlooking the Clearwater River. We try not to trust illusions about how common or how extraordinary our experiences were, or will be. We’re new at this, we know.

With our boxes stacked center-high in the living room, we work at the kitchen first, because so much settling comes with settled food. We wipe down the shelves and countertops with a solution of warm water and bleach. We unroll glasses and cups, plates and pie pans from newspaper packing, rewash all of it despite having packed it clean. We load the shelves with this here, that there, making it up as we go.

We clean behind the refrigerator (because it isn’t our dirt) and discover the secret web-work of the ubiquitous cellar spider, how many summers old? A Pilot V Ball pen, extra fine, black. A dime, and three pennies. Another pen, ballpoint, with “Advantage 2U Appliance, Shingletown CA” printed on the side; the cap red, white, and blue. And in the deepest corner, a plastic monarch butterfly, its toy wings arcing in forever flight. I hesitate with the humming Shop-Vac in my hand—what right do I have—and then plunge in, sucking up the evidence.

Whose gear this is I do not know, whose lives still linger in the webs. Even in their absence, these former inhabitants make their claim. A disquieting mood washes over me: I am an interloper here, a stranger to this place and this space.

We unpack pictures and artwork for the walls. A framed Robert Bly broadside, “No. 76/250, Six Winter Privacy Poems”; a print of Annie Lee’s “Blue Monday”; my treasured shodo piece by my Japanese friend, Mikami; a pencil drawing of the main gate at The Orme School in Arizona, where Suzanne and I met and fell in love. We lean them all against the wall, stacked one in front of the other.

Wandering through the house, we try to picture where our pictures go. “How about this here?” and “How about that there?” we call to each other from different rooms. The walls are peppered with other people’s pounded nails inside the sun-faded outlines of former pictures. I guess at them: family portraits, favorite dogs, a daughter’s graduation. The house holds onto the memory of these former arrangements. I get my hammer and, one by one, jack the nails out.

But some remembrances can’t be removed. The owners, two college professors at the University of California–Chico, are kind, generous people who love this house. They bought two ceramic tiles—one a moon, the other a sun—on a tour through Spain, and mounted them on either end of the shower walls. Bathing is a daily reminder of the first lives embedded in this house.

Still, we’re settling in just fine. Cleaning up overlapping lives—in the house and in us. Old relationships to leave behind, old habits, old attitudes are all replaced with taking care of ourselves and each other. This is the way good new beginnings might be."