There is a house south of Bakersfield, California, and it is a work of art. Its art is not necessarily fine art or modern art, but it does have elements of both. The word eclectic pins this house almost perfectly.

There is modern art in the arrangement of antiques. There is fine art when music from long times past meanders or careens out of one of the many pianos inside.

The orange caboose in the front yard sets the mood immediately. A railroad crossing arm blocks the path from one side of the driveway to the other, its purpose less than enforcing. Railroad ties in the back yard define boundaries and build walls. There are remnants of the old Southern Pacific Railroad Company almost anywhere you can look here.

The roof and the DVD player are, perhaps, the newest things on this property. It was two years ago when my brothers, a friend, and I put the roof on in the alternating heat and rain, and that was when the sun burned the shape of an aardvark on my back (I thought I had the sunscreen equally applied). The sunburn stayed like that for months.

The rest of the artifacts out here might be worth millions, collectively. There are antiques and period pieces in every room—even the closets. Right now, lying on my stomach in the den, I can see a telegraph tapper, several early cameras, and an old-fashioned iron—without a cord. The crazy-quilts in the next room over where sewn by my great-great-grandmother, I think, and their theme is the same as the house’s: mix-match, hodge-podge, puzzle-fitting, eclectic, and every one of these terms in the most positive light possible. Each door you go through brings a new theme, a new atmosphere, and a new set of legends.

This old house used to be somewhere in the middle of Bakersfield, and it used to be half this size. This den I’m writing in used to be a back porch. There is a bathroom in the center of the floor-plan—but it used to have a window, I’m sure, when it was along the wall facing the back yard.

There used to be a pool behind the house, and a gazebo, too, next to it (where my parents were wed). I remember being taught how to swim in that pool (or, as I remember thinking then, how to drown in that pool). The pool was eventually filled in and turned into a garden, after I started remembering things distinctly. Eventually the concrete walk around the pool was broken up and hauled off, and the yard nearly entered normal-status. Surrounded by corn and cotton, the yard still was an oasis in the flat bed of the San Joaquin Valley, with its pines, walnut trees, Granny Smiths, and its willow.

The willow used to be a source of fantasy for me, because its mop of branches would become walls and inside was my haven. The whips, easily removed from the walls of my hideaway, helped me defend myself against the imaginary onslaughts of enemies. I don’t exactly recall when we cut the willow down.

I read The Chronicles of Narnia in one of the walnut trees—the one that’s still there now. The pines are still there, too, but they were always sort of boring because I couldn’t climb them.

My childhood here was my first stage of appreciation for this land. Though I would have then much rather preferred the city, where my friends with better Nintendos lived, and I would have rather taken a bike ride around the block over a walk through the fields of silage any day. Things are—no, everything is so different now.

Two summers ago my grandmother charged me to house-sit the priceless montage of history and American culture. Those two weeks as she enjoyed herself in Israel were some of the most crucial times of my life. The movement of crickets’ songs and frogs’ conversations outside, with the melody of Elliott Smith’s “Twilight” running through my short-term memory—all this defined a period of my life. They were the two weeks that I had to think in silence, absorb art and biblical wisdom, and develop my sense of the world. I wrote a song, and to this day I think it’s one of my best.

There was at least one night where I just sat on the ground behind the back fence, thinking and looking out over the fields, at the lights coming from the farm-houses a mile away.

I walked away from that house-sitting job a fledgling poet, and possibly a bit of a philosopher.

Late last year I returned yet another time on my weekly commute from Newhall to Bakersfield. Something had happened, and I wanted to investigate.

When I got there, I paced and crouched behind the back fence, visualizing the story I had heard.

I saw the tire tracks and guessed where exactly the spot was that the car got stuck in the mud. It was hard to tell. Tire tracks and footprints in the dried mud left no smooth ground in the first road between the back yard and the field.

I imagined the scene: a car stubbornly trudging through the mud until it slowed to a stop, the mud sapping the tread of traction, a man getting out of the car with a gun tucked in his belt, the gun falling out as the man started to panic and run, the man sprinting to the houses and trying to break in anywhere he could, the man heading next door to my great-grandparents’ house, getting in somehow, and trying to coax my Granny into giving him her car keys, the man grabbing the keys and running, driving away in the Buick.

The tire tracks awakened the P.I. inside of me. I hoped I could find a muddy outline of a Beretta somewhere as I paced with my eyes scrutinizing the ground.

But the police (or “the fuzz” as my inner detective called them) had done their jobs—they had caught the man, retrieved the gun from the neighbors down the street who had found it, found the Buick in central Bakersfield, and returned everything that was missing.

So I went and grabbed the secret key to let myself into the house (no one was at home), drank a glass of water from the faucet (from the well behind the South fence, and with plenty of minerals), locked the house back up, and drove off, resuming my weekend. I left behind the eclectic house, but only for a while. I keep going back, even if just to walk through all the doors.