The house at 841 N. Maplewood, my childhood home and the focus of many of these posts, was knocked down yesterday. I was in St. Louis for much of the day with my husband and son, so I wasn’t around to see the big collapse. Yesterday was also my mother-in-law’s 93rd birthday, and we drove down Maplewood around 9:30 pm as we took her home from her birthday party. Ominously, all of the houses on the south end of the block were gone. We could see the silhouette of the Boesen’s brick house, one house from the corner. But then as we moved past it, the outlines of the rubble sitting on the lot of our house came into view.
John stopped the car and we all kind of looked at it. That mess had once been our home? It didn’t seem possible. I had been hoping that the house would somehow defy the laws of physics and refuse to destruct.
No one said anything except our son. He had been with me on many earlier drive bys and asked plaintively, “Why did they knock down mommy’s house?” I told him they were going to build a new building. It was kind of shocking to see the house gone, but my mother-in-law’s birthday put things in perspective. I had told myself that I didn’t want to see the demolition of the house anyway, but in truth, I probably would have watched if I’d been here to see it.
Of course, this morning I had to return to the scene of the crime and watch the mop up operations. When I arrived, the excavator was ripping into the tree on the corner of the lot that my dad and brother planted. I had written about the tree in a previous post with the hopes that it could be saved. Watching the excavator go to work emphasized how beyond quixotic this hope was. In about five minutes, the 30 foot tree was gone. Three swipes by the excavator amputated the branches and a couple more uprooted the trunk. Those excavators are scarily efficient machines. They are like steel, gas-powered dinosaurs. With its vicious-looking maw able to maul anything, the excavator is a most excellent destruction machine. They should make a movie about them along the lines of Killdozer.
After the tree was eliminated, the excavator turned its attention to the debris and began scooping it up and dumping it in the huge truck parked on the front yard. I kept searching for recognizable pieces from the house, but it all looked like a bunch of old wood and other junk. There really is something to that entropy stuff. I imagine by the end of today, the lot will be cleared.
That leaves just one house on the two blocks. You can see why that third little piggy was smart to construct a house of brick.
John stopped the car and we all kind of looked at it. That mess had once been our home? It didn’t seem possible. I had been hoping that the house would somehow defy the laws of physics and refuse to destruct.
No one said anything except our son. He had been with me on many earlier drive bys and asked plaintively, “Why did they knock down mommy’s house?” I told him they were going to build a new building. It was kind of shocking to see the house gone, but my mother-in-law’s birthday put things in perspective. I had told myself that I didn’t want to see the demolition of the house anyway, but in truth, I probably would have watched if I’d been here to see it.
Of course, this morning I had to return to the scene of the crime and watch the mop up operations. When I arrived, the excavator was ripping into the tree on the corner of the lot that my dad and brother planted. I had written about the tree in a previous post with the hopes that it could be saved. Watching the excavator go to work emphasized how beyond quixotic this hope was. In about five minutes, the 30 foot tree was gone. Three swipes by the excavator amputated the branches and a couple more uprooted the trunk. Those excavators are scarily efficient machines. They are like steel, gas-powered dinosaurs. With its vicious-looking maw able to maul anything, the excavator is a most excellent destruction machine. They should make a movie about them along the lines of Killdozer.
After the tree was eliminated, the excavator turned its attention to the debris and began scooping it up and dumping it in the huge truck parked on the front yard. I kept searching for recognizable pieces from the house, but it all looked like a bunch of old wood and other junk. There really is something to that entropy stuff. I imagine by the end of today, the lot will be cleared.
That leaves just one house on the two blocks. You can see why that third little piggy was smart to construct a house of brick.
Below is the one house left on the two blocks of Maplewood.
No comments:
Post a Comment