brick-heap

Updated: May 5, 2025

The photographs on the walls, the twigs of withered box above the crucifixes, the old wedding-dresses in brass-clamped trunks, the bundles of letters laboriously written and as painfully deciphered, all the thousand and one bits of the past that give meaning and continuity to the present of all that accumulated warmth nothing was left but a brick-heap and some twisted stove-pipes!

Edith Wharton - Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort