An Open Letter to the future tenants at 1224 Highland Ave.

Dear future tenants at 1224 Highland,

Foremost, congratulations on signing your lease. That is, if you signed one. There is a chance that instead of signing a lease you were just instructed to show up one day when someone would be there to make sure everything went okay. Nobody will be there. You will not get a key, you will have to wait a couple of weeks for a parking pass, and it will take you awhile to get used to the neighbors. They have a black Taurus parked in front of their house, and it will make you think that Chad is always visiting because he has the same car. Unfortunately, it never is Chad.

X ws the one who found you. Once upon a time, before my time, a man with a gun sat in your living room. His gun, as I have heard, went click, click with empty rounds. He kept the house hot, so the air was heavy and could force out winter. Soon thereafter, a penguin moved into his room. She was the love of my life. The house, although it loved her, was somewhat unkind. Bugs attacked, and whatnot.

Something is broken. Right now, I don't know what that something is, but I assure that you will find out in a couple of weeks. Something will break. During our stay, we lost a door, a kitchen sink, the bathroom sink, the toilet, the air conditioner for a couple of days, the washing machine for awhile.

And don't even consider, for one second, that the dishwasher is more than just a pretty thing to look at. As far as I know, that lazy bitch hasn't washed a thing in her life.

When X was cleaning out the refrigerator, she found a leaf on the bottom shelf. It was old and crunchy. Isn't that odd? Ha! A leaf!

Maybe you're wondering who those people are above the stove. It might be better not to question. Perhaps, instead you should invent stories about those people. Like they were once in a traveling band. Or they are great inventors of the 20th century. Yeah, that's it.

The garbage goes out on Thursday mornings. This is after the nights where you all should gather for dinner under the yellow kitchen lights and eat leftover crusts of cheesebread while debating trivial pursuit questions. It is after Writer's Bloc, too, if that helps.

Watch out for the woman across the street. When you park in the driveway, make sure not to have a single part of your tire in the grass, or you'll get a ticket. She will call and tell on you. Shoveling the driveway is hell, especially since you don't have a real shovel. When the neighborhood kid comes over and asks if he can shovel it for you, say "yes" as quickly as possible and give him a large tip.

The stairs are gross.

The basement likes to pretend it's a pool. Look out for the smell and the mold when it rains, when snow melts, when anything happens.

If you live upstairs and notice that blonde hair is forever sewn into your rug, as though it's part of the design, don't even attempt to vacuum it up. It's just there forever. So are the little white dog hairs that you will forever continue to find. They're just part of that house now.

The bathroom wasn't always yellow. Try to picture a day when once it was light green and white, had a certain charm, and when, after cleaning, looked like it had once been normal or that parents had once felt comfortable bathing their children in the tub. Yes, there is, for some God awful reason, an air conditioning vent in the shower. Don't even ask. In winter, prepare to be really fucking cold.

Speaking of the bathroom, the house has magical powers. When you look at certain parts from squinty eyes and certain angles, it looks like it could somehow be a clean house. In order to survive, you will need to have this feeling every once in awhile. The next day, the house will be dirty, and will seem impossible to clean. It is.

While us writers lived there, we considered ourselves geniuses and we considered ourselves useless. There were days when we woke up in the middle of the night and ran to our desks to write the world, and days when we walked through blowing snow at 9 at night with workshop tears in our eyes. Highland watched it all. Highland had no choice but to hold us on those days, to be home, to be the one place we could go and let it all out.

Look at most of our pictures, and there is Highland. The photo on the front porch before the ball of twine, every Highland host photo in the kitchen, the red paint behind every living room photo. There's Highland. Amazing how it was just there all the time, while we kept moving and changing and growing and loving and hating and writing more and more and more abstratctions. We became teachers in that house, stopped being students in that house.

I don't think the house has any magic powers. Or if it did, we certainly sucked it dry. The day that I helped X clean was what most people call "a scorcher." The house had petered out, and we didn't go with a bang. I think we exhausted it. I don't know what it has in it anymore. It's not white anymore. We took it through its thirties, and now its in mid-life crisis mode.


New renters, I don't know if we will ever meet, but something tells me that we might. Perhaps someday. Perhaps when we all file a class action suit against the landlord for the black mold we've inhaled over the years or realize that the oven somehow made us all infertile, we will meet and share Highland stories. It used to be the baseball house, you know.

Truman lost his virginity in that house. Take care of it, will ya?

Love,

Jeano

P.S. Watch out for the moths.