The Life and Times of Marguerite
That day I walked into someone else's house... someone else'e life. As I recall, it was a beautifully sunny day as we sat on the front porch and waited to go in. The house was secured with mortise locks from the 60s and security doors from Metal Vent. Anyone from Memphis knows these doors. They are iron. And heavy. And very secure. It took a while for the guy to figure out the mortise lock in particular, but he finally had the door open.
We walked into heaviness. It was oppressive almost like being underwater. I knew that the former owner, Marguerite, had passed away in 2011. I knew that she had five children, but only one still lived in Memphis. I didn't know anything else about her or them when we walked through the front door into a mess. I don't know if the word mess even does it justice.
This is what I put together after the fact: Marguerite had spent many years partially disabled as she was diabetic and had trouble with mobility. In 2009, she was moved into a nursing home where she spent the last two years of her life. When she left her home to go to the nursing home, she left it as it was. Her family made no attempt to clean it up after her living there unassisted while disabled. And apparently after she passed away, they tossed the place like regular thieves. They took what they thought was valuable and just left the rest... as it was. They all hated each other so much that the house was some sort of silent stand off between them. None of them were going to clean it out, pay the taxes, or sell it. And so it sat.
In the years between 2011 and 2015, Marguerite's house was home to any number of rats, squirrels and mice. There was poop of various sizes on every surface. Every piece of furniture, inside the cabinets, on the bed, on the countertops, the floors, the carpet... everything was covered in poop pellets. And though it had long dried, the urine was there too. I guess I was fortunate (?) that it had been vacant long enough for the critters to move on. Nobody was still hanging out in Marguerite's house. I guess I was also fortunate that none of the critters had a taste for electrical wiring.
So that day, when we walked in, the house was a wreck. It looked like it had been robbed (though it hadn't). Every cabinet was open. Every closet was ransacked. Every drawer was pulled and dumped out. Every piece of Marguerite's life was tossed around in that house as if a hurricane had passed through room by room. And the sadness of it all emanated from every nook and corner. The overwhelming "WHY???" Why would you do that to your mother?
Dave and I did a quick walk through just to assess everything and went back outside to the porch to wait while the locksmith made me a set of keys. While we were sitting there, I asked him what he thought. My stomach was fluttering because I was so excited to finally be able to go inside and see what I had to work with. I knew it was overwhelming and a mess, but all I saw was the potential for what it could be.
Dave is not like me in that regard. He sees things like this house at face value. And his response said everything, "I'm starting to question your decisions." Pretty much everybody who saw it thought the same thing he did.
I think I will leave day 1 at that sentiment with some photos. I guess only a crazy person would walk into this house and see a diamond in the rough. But I have never claimed to be sane...
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| Layout - these photos are of the DEN |
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| Layout - these photos are of the DINING ROOM |
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| Layout - these photos are of the MAIN HALL |
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| Layout - these photos are of the FRONT BEDROOM |
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| Layout - these photos are of the 2ND BEDROOM |
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| NOTE THE CEILING |
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| Layout - these photos are of the MASTER BEDROOM |
I think I will end with the master bedroom. The kitchen and bathrooms were by far the worst and can be left for another day. Looking back through these photos, they definitely convey the chaotic state the house was left in. But I don't feel like they truly give you the essence of the feeling you got when you walked inside.
Everything was very dark since there was no power, and cave like because all of the drapes and blinds were drawn. The smell was something that I cannot really describe, but I will never forget. It was some combination of rodent excrement, 20 years of bacon grease, human filth from not cleaning for *years*, and some sort of musty odor that rose from the shag carpet that had been there since the 60s and hung in the air.
In addition to the physical odor, there was what seemed like a cloud of guilt and sadness permeating the space and the air. It was hard to breathe for both of us with pressure that makes your chest hurt, almost like when you're heartbroken. Marguerite and her things made that day very heavy and it weighed on anyone who entered for the first several months. Cleaning it out was a learning experience about her and her story.
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