Back From Our Trip to Kansas City

We have returned from our 5,500-mile trip. We had a great time, and we're already thinking about the text trip.

We did spend some time inside the grandparents' house, which was both worse and not as bad as I expected. Not as bad, because I had been lead to believe that everything had been stolen. The truth is different--and stranger--than that: There remains virtually nothing of ordinary /collectable/ value, but we did find some things that probably are worth something to the right collector. Example: _Reader's Digest_ from 1942. Wow.

Unexpectedly, pantry shelves still contained foodstuffs in glass jars--including home-canned foods (now altered beyond recognition by 35 years of storage). Clothing and shoes I recall having seen worn were still in the place. Appliances I recognize from childhood were still there.

The _worse_ was in the fact that the house still contained a large amount of ordinary household furnishings--mostly small stuff, but including clothing, small furnishings, and such that I recognized. Some of these materials had apparently not been touched at all (grandmothers dresses still in closets, jacket and gardening had still on the hook in the mud room, for example), but the whole place was strewn with /stuff/ that had been pulled out of its normal locations and dropped on the floors and onto every other horizontal surface. In some places, piles of /things/ made walking uncertain. In other areas, there was less on the floors but it was obvious nevertheless that things had been carried in from other rooms and abandoned there without any kind of intentionality. Not like someone had been interrupted in the process of moving out, but as if children had overrun the place for an extended period.

This place is down a natural-surface road two miles outside a very small town that is 50 miles from Springfield, MO. Even the vandals seem unable to muster the energy for anything serious; there was virtually no intentional damage beyond some wiring ripped out of walls. There were no drifts of beer cans, no indoor campfires, and in fact nobody had even sat upon any of the few chairs that remained; stuff was on every flat surface. The glass faceplate on the gas stove light had been broken, but the fluorescent tube inside was intact. Several mirrors all over the house were undamaged.

There were newspapers & magazines, picture frames, cooking utensils, jars of spices & flavorings, things, objects--all of the little paraphernalia that houses have in them--everywhere: on the floor, on tables and chairs and couch, on kitchen counters--and still on pantry and closet shelves.

Despite a few broken windows, a roof penetration or two, and open doors, the house is in pretty good condition, considering. Some hardwood floors were still actually nice. The house as a whole is probably not actually restorable to the kind of state that most people would want to pay for, but it is not immediately threatened either.

The barn was another matter. It is over a hundred years old, I think, and an important roof support has failed. Even so, the central structure is stacked log, most of which is still in good condition; the bulk of its metal roof is intact, which has surely helped. It seems safe to enter, but normal use is no longer possible; doors mostly don't work, and climbing into the loft would be seriously imprudent.

We could not enter other outbuildings, which had recently been fenced away from the main property, but I imagine that little of interest remains in them and I doubt they were safe to enter, anyway.

After a few hours, we departed with a large number of photographs and the feeling that we had just spent a period of time in strangeness.

Our trip hope was largely uneventful after we had spent a couple of very pleasant days with Cindy's relations in Morse, TX, and Albuquerque, NM.  We saw and photographed scenery, vistas, views, novelties, and sun-rises and -sets.

And in the course of several legs outbound and back we consumed roughly equal measures of gasoline and coffee.

Great trip! (Pix @ my Picasa.)

Mark_
Federal Way