The house on S. Avenue was a three-bedroom bungalow just down the road from my old apartment on H. Street. It had a number of idiosyncrasies, including bad décor, like the burnt-orange carpeting one room inexplicably covered in dark brown paneling. The bathtub had been painted white, and the paint was always peeling, which was unsightly. And the bathroom wall under the sink was mysteriously decaying, which was unnerving.

Warning: Oddities may be closer than they appear.

Nonetheless, it was the first place I lived in with E. and I mopped the slightly bowed hardwood floors with zeal, willing it to turn into a dream home. Enthusiasm was my only resource as I tried to figure out what it meant to set up housekeeping. While friends and neighbors frequently stopped by, our families never did. Back in my hometown, my parents were boycotting the house as a form of protest about our unwedded state; my mother swore to never set foot in it. Meanwhile, E.’s family had its own problems; his mother was ill and his father had cancer (and would die within two months of our move to S. Avenue). We were on our own, and this gave the house a dislocating Peter Pan quality; hardly anyone over 30 ever came over.

If they had, they wouldn’t have had anywhere to sit, at least at first. We had no furniture, period. I started dumpster diving, thrift shopping, and haunting university auctions for cheap furniture. One find, a scratchy, mustard-yellow couch with a rollaway bed, was short-lived (and I belatedly apologize to all the friends who were forced to sleep on it). Others, like the creaky old rocking chair and the coffee table I dumpstered and painted (for reasons unknown) salmon pink are still with us.

We liked our landlord, Mr. D., a folksy old guy who drove a rattly old pickup, because he made our home possible. Other presences were less benign; once during the first few months, I caught a shady-looking guy peeping into our bedroom window. In panic, I borrowed a baseball bat from P., which I kept under the bed in case the peeper ever came back. (He never did, but I still have the bat.)

Except for that guy, our neighbors were a picturesque set. To the left of us, early on there was neighbor Pete, a friendly guy who painted “Battlescar Prophylactica” on his beater car and graciously helped me carry home dumpstered furniture without comment. On the other side was the “House of Surly,” a dark dilapidated place inhabited by surly looking (but reasonably friendly) metalheads. They moved on and were replaced by various alternative types, including, in our final year there, a young woman took up playing electric guitar on the porch at night. I fumed, but E., always reasonable, patiently went over there for a calm discussion about “ambient noise.”

Ambient noise wasn’t our only problem. One early morning I came into the living room to find the cats playing boredly with something on the floor. The toy turned out to be a barely living, exhausted mouse, which lay panting on the floor while the cats filed their nails. Anxious to do something, I jumped up on a kitchen chair and yelled for E. He scooped it up and put it outside on the three-foot-square lawn in front of the house.

We were hoping it would run away, but I saw it lying there when I left for work a little later. Maybe it’s just resting, I told myself. I never found out for sure, because the landlord came round with a lawn mower that day and that was the end of that.

Other guests, though, were welcome. We were fond of dinner parties, cooked using the least practical cookbook twentysomethings could own, The Silver Palate Good Times. Other popular dishes included E.’s Texas chili and ordered-in tacos, with “Potato Oles” for those with sodium deficiencies.

Guests liked to sit outside on our front porch. I also remember the porch fondly, but these days I am nostalgic for the driveway, which we’ve never had since. Our driveway came to be occupied by E.’s 30-year-old MG convertible, which didn’t actually run. In turn, it was eventually occupied by an opossum, which I nicknamed Elmo.

Elmo’s removal necessitated a live trap. The first night we caught a luckless neighborhood cat. The second night we ostensibly caught Elmo, whom we drove out to the country and set free. This was quite an achievement, but we had not caught the right possum. Returning home, we found the original Elmo, still living in the car; eventually he, too, was caught and relocated. There’s a lovely picture of Chris and a caged Elmo on one of these outings.

Chris loads up the car with Elmo, lower left.

By 1995, I, too, was feeling caged. Finding challenging career opportunities was becoming more difficult and I was starting to tire of the lack of privacy a small town affords. Our friends were having a much more exciting time, it seemed to me, in big cities like Chicago, New York, or Seattle. Moving away had seemed impossible five years before, but now it seemed like the next logical step.

By that summer, we were ready to go. Regretfully I took down all the clippings and cleaned out the closets. To this day, I still have a soft spot for the S. Avenue house. It was the first place where we had a vision of what it would be like to be grown up. And for all its peeling paint and oddities, it had a lot of charm. Before I left, I mopped the floor one more time.

Cats stalk through the bedroom on East S. Ave. Also notable are the fuzzy pink slippers, shaped like pigs!

What happened after: The house is still there, albeit a little more down at the heels. Recently we noticed that it now has central air conditioning, which would have been the height of luxury during our tenure. The House of Surly has since been renovated.

Next: House of Squirrelly John.