I used to live in a haunted house. Oh, the house itself wasn't haunted.  It was as cold as a crypt, but it wasn't haunted.  It was just one of those typical military-issue ugly houses. Architecture is, I fear, not a high priority item for the military.

These quarters had garages like noses, driveways like tongues.  They stood in the last few blocks of open housing the Navy owned on an old Air Force base in Massachusetts. Thousands upon thousands of closed and empty houses stood in swathes around us.  It was creepy. Haunted.  Like living in a ghost town.   

For the past few months, every time I've read anything about closing or moving military bases, I have thought of that mothballed neighborhood.  I didn't want any part of our home base to have that haunting emptiness. But that is what happens to places that the military leaves -- even big places.

That base in Massachusetts had been among the largest during the Cold War.  Their airwings had been relocated when the fashion was to spread out military assets.  I used to spend my autumn afternoons following our dogs through sugar maples and red oaks that lined forsaken streets.  Those trees seemed to burn, flow, and drip with fire.

It was silent back there, beautiful, really.  And sad.  I would walk and walk, counting up the trees.  Then I'd be aware, suddenly, that the old refrigerators seemed to tip and peer out on the empty street from behind windows. Deserted swing sets creaked.

I would walk faster.  

When I got home, I would call my mother and sister to tell them about a neighborhood that seemed so much like the ones we lived in growing up --except for their emptiness.  I would tell how I sometimes thought that ghosts were about to unlatch the screen doors and come running into their yards.

Kindergarteners would climb off blue Air Force buses with school bags like a little plastic briefcases. Daddies in flight suits would unfold from their cars. Mosquito trucks with kids on their spider bikes clinging to the bumper would troll the neighborhood at twilight.  

My mother had visited me, had walked on those streets. She felt the same things. She said to walk somewhere else.  

But the idea intrigued my sister.  She said that ghosts are usually restless spirits, people who died with something unfinished. I thought that was kind of silly.  Surely people didn't die too often in military housing.   Plenty of people conceived there, gestated there, were born there.  But how many people could have died in a restless way?  No one ever lived there long enough to really call it home.  

But my sister thought that maybe that was exactly why the place seemed so haunted.  That so many people pass through a military base.  They live there so intensely, never settling or finishing anything before moving on.  

I think we get a sense of that sometimes in military towns -- especially now that we are in a time of war.  The ships all go to sea at once.  The air wings deploy.  The interstate empties even at rush hour.  Restaurants aren't full on Friday nights.  The emptiness creeps in.  

When they talk about closing our base, I think of that empty town in Massachusetts.  I've been told that the development has been reclaimed. That there is an over-65 section of houses and another section that is full of kids on bikes and dads dragging the trash cans to the curbs and moms rushing home from work.  

I'm glad about that.  But on autumn afternoons, I hope there is a sense that military people lived and loved there.  Once upon a time.