Saying a Final Goodbye to the House in West Milford

Back in mid-February, I posted a blog entry about how I had been working clearing the old family house in West Milford. It was hard and tedious work, physically and mentally exhausting. 

Well on Monday, the official closing on the house was completed. Now, the house no longer belongs to the family at all. The last two members of our family to set foot in that house were my son and I on Monday, which was three days ago as I write this. 

We got as much of any real value out of the old house as we realistically could. Even then, there are a few things here and there that I regret not having managed to take, particularly a very large aerial map of Paris. It was called the "Plan de Paris à vol d'oiseau" by Georges Peltier, and is truly remarkable, showing all of the buildings and roads in the city of Paris from many decades ago, although most of those from the vantage point in the map had hardly changed since then. My father had gotten two of these maps, either sometime in the late 80's or early 90's.  He actually had gotten two big versions of them, although the smaller one (which was pretty big nonetheless) had been missing for a long time. The larger one was in the entryway to the basement, and was truly enormous. It was nailed in and high up, and would have been difficult to take down. And I would not know how to transport it from there to someplace else. Finally, the map (which was on some kind of board backing, if I recall correctly) would likely have been too big for anywhere that I could think to keep it. Still, I decided that maybe I should try and save it, but I just ran out of time. For the most part, I had not gone in that entryway and had forgotten about it until I went inside of the stairway and saw it for the first time really in years. It is perhaps the biggest regret that I have from the work in the house, not being able to save it. 

Here is what it looked like:

Unfortunately, I was not able to save this very large map, the dimensions of which were truly enormous, and would have covered a whole section of a typical living room in an American house. However, again, there were plenty of things that we did manage to get, including some old family photographs that my ex-wife happened to find (and which apparently eluded me for a very long time). These pictures I will try and post in an upcoming blog entry in the near future.

Right now, we are just beginning to sort through all of the stuff that we got in those final days. And now, we are also adapting to the idea that the house is indeed finally gone. I drove by there earlier this morning, and was truly shocked at how much work they had already done on it, and that it already was beginning to look a lot different. If it were necessary to drive home the point that this is no longer our house, that certainly did 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!

Here are the two most recent (and last) pictures of the house that I took, which were taken in February.

 

I decided to add these pictures below, which are of Candy, my unofficial dog (I never had a dog as a kid growing up). She really loved me and paid me a visit anytime that she could. Each of these three pictures was taken on or near the property in West Milford, and so it seemed like a good idea to include these as well: