1137 Ebert Street

My friends, Ryane and Matt were in the neighborhood because they bought a new house a street over from mine. It’s a house I drive by every day but never really noticed. It’s one of the last in the immediate area that hasn’t had a massive makeover in the past few years. Soon, it’ll be off the list. When they dropped by my house, they told me about all the stuff left behind.

When I went inside the house, I got a weird vibe. It wasn’t in great shape. The stuff that was left on the first floor hadn’t been touched in years. It was dusty. No one had lived in the house for four years. Most surprisingly, it had been in the same family since it was built in the 1930’s. It was a new neighborhood then. Although my house is only a street over, it wasn’t listed on one of the neighborhood layouts we found in the house.

I collected a few things from downstairs, but the older stuff was upstairs. The old stuff is always in the attic. There I found a treasure trove of old paper. What was left was the whole history of the family who had lived there. Ther were wedding pictures, and even kids report cards. If the paper was old, I put it in a big pile. The pile kept growing as we moved around the super-hot attic. It was miserable up there, awful. It was a heat that you could smell, dusty. I put everything in my car and slowly moved it to my house. It took me two hours before I dried out.  

Sorting paper at my house.

At my house I started working through some of the bulk. No matter how much I took, the amount I would use would be minimal. Everything gets smaller and smaller as you make collages. You look for the perfect pieces first. The pieces of paper that time has drastically altered. It must have the time to “cure.” It needs decades of intense heat and water damage. Paper that becomes brittle after being stacked in a poorly ventilated house for over half a century is what you’re looking for. This sort of stuff you can’t buy at a hobby store. People just toss it! What I found was amazing because of the amount of old, beautifully decaying paper.

One of the main things I went through were all the pictures taken in the house about twenty years ago. Most of them had the two same people in them, the guy who was the direct relative of the first owner, and his wife or girlfriend. In most of these pictures they were hanging out in the house getting drunk or high. They took pictures of their Christmas tree every year along with their sketchy friends getting drunk or high in front of the Christmas tree. One whole role was dedicated to a raccoon they befriended and brought into the house. A few pictures were of a risqué nature that no one ever needs to see. The lady liked to periodically dress up. Worst of all, was a picture of a double amputee completely naked laying on a soiled bed, people gathered around him, smiling.

The more I looked through the pictures, the more I learned about these people. The main guy got arrested in 1975 for selling weed. The family kept both his arrest records and the correspondence with their lawyer. The “newer” pictures made me a little sad. Some of the items in the pictures from 1998, like the Budweiser clock and the Dallas Cowboys trashcan, were in the exact spot twenty-five years later.

Whenever I find personal items (pictures, family records etc.) in a free bin somewhere, I never have such invested feelings. When random bits of paper are without context, without a place or people to tie them to, there’s no narrative around them. Most of the time, you only get snapshots of people, bits about how their lives were constructed. When you see the house, see the bedroom where they lived and then have an extensive account of their lives, they seem a lot more real. 

A few interesting pieces of paper I found in the house.

Keep in mind, these are the things that were left behind. Family members could have taken everything and retained a large portion of their family history. Instead, they chose to leave them in the house. They left these things…no one wanted them.

The day after my first visit to the house, I went out to the thrift stores like I’ve done for decades. When I got around to the free bin at McKay’s I investigated the containers a little less than excited. Everything that I normally look for in those stacks of awful books was what I filled my car up with the day before. Having such great stuff took the joy of looking out of the process, no need to look.

And then I went back to the house for one more round. This time I had a plan. I brought some bags with me. This time I picked through things in the little rooms in the attic. One box was full of pictures from Missouri, many of them dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century. There was even an album of pictures from the 1920’s or 30’s, I’m assuming from Missouri as well. The people looked like they were from Missouri. I filled up my two bags quickly. I even got a moderately salacious Olde English sign which was clearly, not from the 1920’s. I declined the cow skull. They think it’s a cow, maybe a bear.

When I got everything upstairs in my house, in what was once an attic, I started to separate everything. I had a pile to cut up, a pile to rip through, a pile to dump, and a pile to scan. My whole upstairs area was filled with paper. I spent an hour cutting paper and then immediately dove into making collages. Since everything was somewhat organized, I made one college after another. Pictures of the family were mixed with things kids made and that was mixed with legal documents. I made collages with only items I pulled from the house. This is the goal; see what new thing I can construct out of these discarded memories. The collages will be sent all around the world. It was either I made them into things, or they would been thrown away. 

Collages made with items found in the house.