When the town of Northridge was just beginning to take root, a lone house was built apart from the others. The house unlike the others, whose paint had been chipped and peeled by the harsh winds and rains that seemed ever present to the townsfolk; their once immaculate concrete porches now blanketed in mud and dust. The new house's facade, however, was perfect in comparison. The paint, a cheery yellow, was plastered on the Victorian's wooden exterior in a clean and orderly fashion. The landscaping blanketed the lush grass yard with reds, pinks, purples, and blues. The porch decked in patio furniture. Everything about the house seemed perfect, from the exterior.

The inside of the house was significantly less than the exterior. It contained pile upon stack of clutter and debris of various objects, most of which had no place inside a home. A shovel stacked atop teetering dog bowl, squished between a rusted farming hoe and an old ship in a glass bottle, were only a few of the items clustered about the living room. The remainder of the house resembled the living room. Each contained the oddest of odd contents. All had the same faded black ivory wallpaper and heavy purple velvet drapes blocked any sunlight that might have breached through the windows. The lack of natural light was made up for by an extensive amount of wax candles that had been burned to a stub.

The occupants of the house resembled their home in various ways. The mother was as disorganized as the inside of the household. The father acted much more like the perfectly painted paint of the house, and pristine lawn. The children, always rushing between pile of objects and strange materials, were more like the sounds of their mother's piles of treasures toppling onto the floor, always banging and thrashing about the house.

The children, smart and clever as they were, could never seem to find enough ways to entertain themselves outside of their cramped house, so they often resorted to embracing the hoard, and played among it. They played games such as how high can you stack this, hide and go seek tag, and the ever popular, can you find the lid to this jar, as there always seemed to be a pile of jars missing lids in the drawing room. The house was always filled with the smells of their mother's baking and the giggles and muffled squeals of the two boys. The father would come home from his job, the family would sit at the kitchen table for dinner, if the old newspapers stacked ever so high on the table allowed it,  the children would tell their mother and father of the great adventures they had during the afternoon, the father would nag at the mother to get rid of some of her "junk", to which her answer was always a resonant  no, and they would go to bed, as they did every night. They continued their routine of the children playing, the mother cooking, and the father working and complaining until the day came when they didn't. When the children had grown up and long left the house, the mother became too old and fragile to cook, and the father retired from his job, but never his nagging, the house grew empty and alone.

After months of vacancy the boys, now men came back to a no longer perfect house. The once cheery yellow paint was now faded to a yellow tinted grey and peeling from the rotted wooden boards. The once perfectly manicured lawn was now browning and wilted, and the wooden porch was covered in a thick blanket of dust and mud, and could never be stepped on again without giving way to the ground full of weeds. The two fully grown brothers pried open the rear door of the house, to a dusty and messy space, that could once be called a living room, of junk. The brothers crept inside the house and began looking over all the items and trash among the place. Every odd and end they could remember from their childhood was somewhere in that house, scattered among the other useless things.

Taking bits at a time they began to stack the junk into their make shift fire pit. The pile grew and grew, wider than a large red oak and taller than the first story of the house. After hour upon hour of work furniture began to appear from underneath the clutter, an old lumpy green sofa, a round wooden coffee table, a painted toy chest. The house began to resemble what a house should have been and the pile grew three times wider and taller. It grew tall enough to be seen over close by treetops, and tall enough for any nosy neighbors to have a good look. When the house was nearly empty the brothers discovered something different from the other odds and ends. The drawers throughout the house were all crammed with junk, trash, and litter, but their mother's left bottom hand drawer in her vanity was nearly empty. A single leather-bound journal was all it held.

The journal, with yellowing pages and fading writing was filled with strange dates and objects, but nearly every page seemed to hold one of the boy's names. An object, a date, and a child's name, the pattern repeated over and over again. Neither boy could decipher the code, so they began to walk back to their pile with flint in hand, when the smaller of the two noticed a connection between the book and the treasures in the pile. Each date was the time either of the boys did something for the first time, and the object had helped accomplish what they had done.

With their new perspective the men quit work for the day and started a new project the next. They began building a shed the size of a small room. Once finished the treasures were carefully placed inside the shelter, and left unburned. The men also began to fix the old house, they repainted the cheery yellow, replaced the rotting floorboards, re-wallpapered the walls and refurbished the old and worn furniture, and they brought their families to come and live in the house, that once again was filled with children's laughter, the smell of dinner cooking, and the bustle of people, but the house never again grew cluttered with debris and odds of unknown objects. It however did grow to be home of many more treasured artifacts and leather bound journals that held the many stories of children and children's children who lived there each who came to hold their possessions dear in a most materialistic way.