111 E 4th

I had a weird dream the other night about the house that my brother and I lived in for our last few years in Kansas. It was at 111 E 4th and is no longer there. It has the distinction of being the only home I've lived in that no longer exists. Odd, isn't it? They tore the house down soon after my brother and I left for Los Angeles, after my parents moved in for a spell during a weird limbo period between selling their own home in Hays and moving east to Kansas City.
It wasn't anything spectacular, but it was the first house I ever shopped for and "bought" myself. Actually, my dad bought it, but it was I who came up with the idea and even backed it up with some mathematics. I figured out that it would be way more financially wiser for my parent to purchase a home for Brandon and I to live in during college, rather than us paying rent to someone else, because later my parents could sell the house for more than they paid for it (the housing market in Hays generally always going up), and thus profiting rather than loosing the money Brandon and I would have spent on rent elsewhere. After the long process of convinving my dad that this was a good idea, he allowed me to meet with realtors on my own and look for the "perfect" house; perfect meaning one that was under $20,000 and still liveable. I remember looking at some real doozies: there was one on 8th Street that had cracks in the basement so big that you could literally see outside through them. Others were too small, too old, or too expensive. Finally, I went to a different realtor who showed me the house I was looking for: A fairly-recently remodeled two-bedroom bungalow with a full, unfinished basement and a nice, big front porch, just a block of Main Street and a short distance from campus. It was a little more than my dad wanted to pay, but it was leaps and bounds better than most of the other houses I had seen, and the unfinished basement was like a canvas waiting to be painted.
I remember when we got the keys to the house finally and we excitedly drove downtown to begin moving in. The house was so empty and plain but full of potential.
Looking back, I would have been wise to simply hang some photos and posters, move in the furniture, and start living. I was after all in college at the time and already planning to move as soon as I finished. I'm not sure when I had made the determination that it would be to Los Angeles, but it was around the same time.
However, back then I was so much more about living in the moment, and being that it was my first "house" in Hays that wasn't my parents (even though it really was, but they didn't live there), I really wanted to decorate the house to my own tastes. Unfortunately my tastes were a little more expensive than I had finances to back up. I put a lot of paint, wallpaper, and building materials on my credit cards. I turned the living room into a silver and purple fantasy that my mom always said looked like 'some old lady's bedroom'. I build my own bedroom in a corner of the basement with 2X4's and wood panelling. I even crafted a make-shift dry bar in the rec room, which would double as our band's rehearsal space (at the time, Brandon and I were in the midst of our first band, Singe, which became Plaything at some point while we lived in the house.) Lastly, I insisted that my father install a dropped ceiling in the basement and carpet the rec-room.
Within a few months, we had a pimped-out party pad that even had an above ground swimming pool in the back yard (another credit card purchase). All was great; that was, until....
The rains came. Being only a few yards from Big Creek, we officially lived in a Flood Zone, and although the precipitation never waged war on us, previous floods had wreaked havoc on the house's foundation. Rain water seeped in through invisible cracks and collected on the floor of my bedroom and the rec room. The carpet I had just bought was completely soaked. All our band equipment had to be moved to the dry side of the basement. I had to drain my water bed in order to remove the carpet so I could take it outside to dry. A faint mildew smell permeated my belongings and never quite left the basement after that.
Luckily for me, I had other things to look forward to, and the knowledge that I would only be in this house for a short time. Still, it bothered me immensely any time it rained and I had to worry about whether or not the basement was going to get wet. I spent a lot of nights up in the guest bedroom, which we called the nursery and had painted a very odd color scheme and adorned with a very old-lady-like wallpaper border of a scene featuring some little huts. Whenever a friend would come over to party, we would take a polaroid photo of him or her and allow them to choose a hut to call their own, and then affix the polaroid next to their chosen hut. Anyway, when it would rain, I would have to sleep in this room on something that we called "the futon from hell".
Anyway, I do look back on the house and our time their fondly, and when I heard that the city of Hays had bought and bulldozed the property to make way for a parking lot, I was deeply saddened, yet also oddly satisfied knowing that we gave that house one last she-bang before it's inevitable demise. No one else would ever live within those walls. The finality of it was something I had never really experienced in my life. It's much easier to leave somewhere when you know you can never, literally, go back home. [I just remembered, that our sister Adrienne was actually the last person to live in the house, and I'm sure she gave it a few memorable parties as well].
So the only way I visit the house now is through occasional dreams, and as I was saying, one of these occured the other night. In the dream, I was back in the empty house and for whatever reason I had to move my current employer's offices into the house where I would be working from home basically. In the dream I nostalgically wandered throughout the house and regarded each room; not allowing myself to be aware of the reality that the house was long gone.
The next day, I experienced something I don't believe I've ever experienced before: olfactory hallucinations. Throughout the day, I frequently became overwhelmed by a sickly sweet, completely fake floral scent which was so specific to me it was downright eerie. The smell was that of the scented diary pages in which I recorded each day of the year 2000 - the year that I graduated from college and moved to Los Angeles, leaving Hays behind. Every night for the last 5 months that I lived at 111 E 4th, I wrote in that diary, drunkenly scribbling out the day's events on those rose-scented pages.
If it is a clue, I am wide open to receive the message, I just can't make sense of it. But, maybe writing this all down was all the house wanted me to do.