The House in West Milford

Recently, I have been working clearing the old family house in West Milford. It has been hard and tedious work, physically and mentally exhausting.

The work, however, is almost over. The process of this old family house being sold is already well under way, as well. It is just a matter of time now. Maybe a month, probably a bit more than one month or so. But as I figure it, it should be in the family's past well before the latter part of spring. We may see some warm days here and there, but the winter will be over before it is in the past.

Still, the end of our time there is clearly nearing. There are a lot of problems with the house, so it is not going for a premium price. Nor is my work going to complete the clearing of the house. The rest of that process will have to be completed by whoever purchases it. There are just some pieces of furniture and huge boxes - not empty - that would be too much for me to take care of, unless I were to rent a truck and arrange some kind of thing where I can either give the stuff away or toss it out. Frankly, the work that I have done feels extensive enough. At this point, it feels like something better left to be done by the professionals, who know what to do and how to do it. 

There are some bittersweet feelings that go with this. We lived there for a long time, and it has been with the family now for just shy of 40 years (the anniversary would have actually been this coming summer). I was in the third grade when we moved there, and my brother was in fifth grade. We both went through the West Milford school system right through high school graduation, and both lived there through college graduation. My parents still lived there for many years yet, and so it was still very much in our lives, even through the birth of my son, who got to visit the house and - briefly - even lived there himself with his mom.

Of course, there are some good memories, but there are also some bad and/or sad memories, as well. Mostly, it saddened me to see how much the place began to fall apart. Even while clearing the place, there was a mixture of good and bad. I kept running into some things cool things that I was looking for, some things that I had believed long gone or lost. Among those were some pictures, many of which came as a very pleasant surprise, and I will be publishing those in the coming days and weeks.

So I thought it might be good to start the process off by showing pictures of the house itself, in better days. These pictures were taken most likely somewhere either in the late eighties or early nineties, and obviously just after a major snowfall blanketed the property and the town. It is more the way I would want to remember the house then in it's present condition. 

Here are the pictures. Enjoy!