My first personal essay

Well, I just finished my first true peice of full creative writing. We were given the assignment of writing a personal essay, and that's it. Just write a 5 page, 250-500 words per page personal essay. Well I was pretty stumped as to write about. I mean how do you just write about you, about yourself, I mean? Well, Gene solved this problem for me by suggesting I write about the Big House. Problem solved. :) Here are a few excerpts from the paper. I couldn't pulish the entire thing since, well, it's five pages long. But Gene picked out his favorite parts. Hope you enjoy this little treck down memory lane.

"As I said before, the back stairs emptied into the kitchen. The kitchen was an old prairie style kitchen with large window sills for holding pies and impossibly tall cabinets for keeping cookies and sugar out of the hands of greedy children. It even had the requisite black and white tiled linoleum floor. It was as if a giant chess or checkerboard has set up residence in our kitchen. I think my physics major roommates ruminated buying life-size pieces and requisitioning the room for the ultimate geek tournament. However, make no mistake; this was no idealized grandmother’s kitchen. Dirty dishes grew attached to the side of the sink. The old built-in ice chest now served as a makeshift liquor cabinet – very well too I might add. There were rat traps behind the refrigerator and a bottomless pile of junk and detritus on the table. One day I was alone in the house and walked into the kitchen to find a pot of water boiling itself away on the stove. No one was in sight and there was no note as to its purported use; so I turned off the burner and walked away shaking my head. Later that night discovered one of my male roommates in the kitchen watching the same pot boiling the same water. When I asked him what was going on, he replied that he was “cleaning it.” “The water?” I asked. “No, the pot. I’m sanitizing it. I didn’t want to wash it out so I’m just boiling it to death.” I nodded my head and backed out of the room resolving never to use that pot again. There was also the wall of drunkenness and nudity. Actually it was the back of the back door, but it served to commemorate the various drunken and al fresco debauchery that took place in the Big House. Various photos and Sharpie™ drawings chronicled the progression of inebriation that lead to bare-skinned push-ups and pull-ups in the kitchen, unclad Chinese fire drills around the house, and disrobed physics on the whiteboard."

"Despite the eccentricities of the Big House, it still remains as one of the best and most vivid memories of my college experience. Perhaps it was due to not the singular nature of the house itself, but primarily to the events that happened there. There was the night of the flies when somehow from the deep recesses of our stygian and cell-like basement out came a horde of black flies. The fly paper strips were instantly black with the buzzing, vibrating bodies of the invaders. We later surmised that something had died in the basement, but none of us was brave or stupid enough, depending on your interpretation, to venture into its subterranean enclosures. We left that for the next tenants. Or maybe it was the drive-off from the lawn. A local transient with whom two of my roommates were acquaintances came to our door making a nebulous comment about needing to use the restroom, and then promptly took off through the house and out the front door. A persistent honking began from the Lumina parked on our lawn clued us in that this was more than unusual. The transient owed the guy in the car money and had told him he would get it from us. Needless to say the man was less than pleased when we informed him that a) the transient had run-out on him and b) we were poor college students who had about $27 among us, so he drove through the back, side, and front yard of the Big House to show his displeasure.
I returned to the Big House recently while accompanying two students on a scholarship audition to Drake. It has new paint and the tangled shrubs ensconcing the house had been taken away. It looked better cared for, but it still seemed lonely. It lacked the life that only a half dozen poor college students could give it. It was empty, a hollowed out hull that had once held just hopes, just dreams. I fantasize about what it would be like to buy it and restore it to its former glory. Yet, in a way, I think in doing that it would lose something very elemental, very vital to its very nature. This house carves itself into your memory, into your essence; to change the house itself would be to change the memories and the life that existed there, and who would want to change perfection? "