Housing

Driving around after the perfect phone, I caught myself staring out the window and the same landscape I have been looking at since I've moved here. But something was different today. An old house, unlike all the other old houses in the South of France (example below) was missing.

Now I know this house had been empty for a long, long time. At least for the eleven years I've been here and even then it was pretty dilapidated. But it was always there, you know, like a trusty stone that has a mark that you can recognize on a long walk, or an old tree in the park you visit. This house was the house used by seemingly every pigeon and dove in the city and out, as a kind of safe house or a home to return to. Or at least I like to think of it that way for the thousands of pigeons that perched on that roof.
But now. It's gone. Torn down apparently, says my mother, in the two weeks that I was gone to class. Surprising, I thought at first, since it takes the French six years to even build a house and tearing anything down seems impossible (considering the ruin that is at this moment standing right in front of my house and is very decided to stay there forever, unused. It makes you wonder why people keep making new houses when they could just fix old ones, or at least let homeless people live in the empty stuff).
In any case, today, as we drove by, there were about twenty pigeons on the electric cord that hangs next to where their house used to be. Staring down into the empty lot. I couldn't help but feel bad for them. So for all those homeless pigeons I send out a silent good luck and hope that old ladies everywhere go sit on their benches and dispense some needed bread to our fluffy little friends.