> As populations move and shrink, people are leaving long-occupied places behind. Often they leave everything in place, ready for a return that never comes. In Tyurkmen, Christmas baubles still hang from the curtain rails in empty houses, slowly being wrapped by spiders. In one abandoned home, a porcelain cabinet lay inside a crater of rotted floorboards, plates still stacked above a spare packet of nappies for a visiting grandchild. Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.
This always confuses me. If I were abandoning my home of my own volition, I'd take my possessions with me.
Every time I've moved, it involved getting rid of piles of stuff. And my next move will probably be a downsize. I'm already on a mission to get rid of X cubic foot of stuff per year. After helping my mom downsize, I've lost my nostalgia for keeping old stuff around. And my kids want none of it -- they don't know if they will ever own a house, or necessarily what country they'll even live in.
And of course I wonder why stuff piles up. The reasons include laziness and probably a mild hoarding instinct.
Christmas decorations and nappies both strike me as the sort of thing that would get left behind, they're pretty poor in the value/space tradeoff, not to mention that a lot of these houses were left behind when elderly people died. It's not uncommon for elderly people to have stuff they accumulated over the years, it would not surprise me if there's christmas decorations that have been unused for decades in my grandmother's attic, or nappies that were once for grandchildren that are now adults. In a country where the population is growing, this stuff just gets dumped as the heirs clear out the house to sell, but what are these houses in the middle of nowhere with infrastructure that has crumbled away worth?
Those old homes are usually used as storage for things that don't fit into their new, urban homes. The market value and taxes are low, so there's no point in selling.
Then eventually, without realizing, you have gone there for the last time, and there's nothing left to move to your new home.
Alternatively, the last old person who lived in the house dies or goes into a care home, and their kids (if they have any) never find the time to clear out the old place. There's no one to sell it to, anyway, so they have all the time in the world.
This always confuses me. If I were abandoning my home of my own volition, I'd take my possessions with me.