Pre Post-Mortem

A couple of my siblings warned me not to do it. But in the end, I couldn’t help myself.

Bradley University told the students living at 841 N. Maplewood that they needed to be out of the house by May 20. So on Sunday, May 20, I asked my husband John to meet me there at 2:30 pm. As a Bradley student, John had walked by the house hundreds of times, but had never been in it.

When I pulled up in front of the house with my son in the back seat, the heavy front door was wide open. I walked in with my four-year-old son calling out, “Hello! Is anyone here?” No one responded, which surprised me as a heck of a lot of stuff was still in the house—mattresses, bookcases, clothes, desks, dressers, dishes, even a case of unopened beer on the back porch. I remember guiltily leaving a pair of used skis behind when I left the California university I was attending in the 1980s; the throwaway society is now in full bloom.

But, anyway, who cares about the stuff. I was there to see the house. . . and it was in amazingly good condition. The light fixtures with the crystal dangling things in the hallway and the dining room were still there. The marbled fireplace was beautiful. All of the walls were painted white with the exception of the downstairs bathroom which still bore the orange and yellow flowered paper that my mom now describes as ugly. The kitchen cabinets my parents installed, probably 30 years ago, looked good as did the woodwork that my dad spent months laboriously stripping endless coats of paint from. All of the carpet my parents had put in had been removed to reveal the hardwood floors beneath. A scrap of the light blue carpet in my old bedroom lined the closet floor.

As John and Luke and I wandered through the house, I pointed out the architectural landmarks of my childhood: those are the radiators we sat on to warm ourselves before school; this was the shelf the television sat on until my youngest brother tried to pull it down on himself (after this, our 19 inch black and white TV sat directly on the floor, a placement that seemed normal to us and odd to everyone else); here is where we ran to my dad every evening as his whistle announced he was home. In a pathetic exercise, I took a lot of pictures.

While the good condition of the house—there were no holes in the wall or broken windows, perhaps a testament to the fact that at least recently there were female volleyball players living there—initially made me feel better, the knowledge had a bitter after taste. It might be easier to justify knocking down a wreck of a house, but wreck doesn’t describe the place. The house seems so solid, so well made. As my dad related, a houseguest who stayed with us one Christmas said it was very nice to stay in a place where you didn’t know when the toilet was being flushed.

My husband John, dad Ed, and son Luke stand in front of 841 N. Maplewood.