He wanted to SEE everything

I miss my little boys but I realize how lucky I was to have them, two beautiful, curious, intelligent creatures that kept me challenged. Leif always wanted to be UP where he could see everything that was going on around him. I found I could do just about anything around the house if I carried him around in a baby backpack, but if I put him down, he would wail. If he could crawl and get to something interesting, that was okay, but otherwise, he wanted to be carried in some fashion until he could pull himself up and walk. 

I made many a meal with that heavy little fellow jouncing up and down on my back. He was strong, and he would hook his little toes in the support that ran across my lower back and "jump" up and down with glee.

This photo was taken by my mother. It hadn't seen the light of day because it was so badly exposed and color shifted that she had never printed it or showed it to anyone. I'm surprised she didn't just throw the slide away. As hard as I worked with PhotoShop, I couldn't get the color and exposure right. For instance, the cabinet walls were a supposed to be a lovely shade of blue. The shirt I'm wearing actually had a brown background color. Our faces in the original slide were a lurid magenta-red. So, this will have to do, but I love it because he looks joyful and brings back the memories of those days in that kitchen, in a house no longer standing. It was taken early in 1976 when he was just over a year old.

 

It would have been his 46th birthday

 

This is the thirteenth of Leif's birthdays we have spent without him. Not a day goes by that we do not think of him and talk about him, or even talk to him, though there is no answer. Our lives are still full of memories and things that remind us of him. 

As I scan more and more old slides and negatives of ours and my mother's, I find photos of him I have never seen before, or that maybe, I saw when a roll of slides was first developed and not since then, as we had only a select few developed and haven't projected slides in many years. These "new" photos are special surprises. This is one of them. I've posted photos of his birthdays, but never one of his first birthday. 

It was a small birthday party, with the four of us and the boys beloved babysitter, Rhonda. The cake was an almond cake with green frosting, and it sure did look homemade. It had a big thick candle in the middle (it had been backed in an angel food cake pan) and Leif was a little scared of it. Once the candle was blown out and removed, he enjoyed his cake and did pretty well with a spoon for a one-year-old.

We were happy that his hand was no longer bandaged that day. The poor little guy had gotten horrible third degree burns on his left hand at the old Occupational Therapy Department at Fort Riley when he grabbed an unprotected live steam pipe that fed the heating system. He had a lot of painful medical treatment and physical therapy but luckily his hand healed with no permanent injury, and the bandages were off for his birthday.

I look at those bright little eyes and know how he took in the world, figuring things out, testing them, how his mind was always working. I wish I could have made him a cake today.

Taken January 28, 1976 in the old stone house on Moro Street, Manhattan, Kansas. With him are his dad and his brother. 

Back to Manhattan and More Memories

So many memories are tied to places and events. We just made a trip to Manhattan, Kansas, where Leif was a baby, where he graduated from high school and college. We drove by the places we used to live, toured the high school, went through the City Park where he used to participate in SCA "fights." So many memories. We saw some of his best friends and the boy who bears his name.

We made the trip to visit family and attend a class reunion, but going back to a place we spent so many years with Leif brought back memories I hadn't thought of in years.

The house where this photo was taken, our old stone house on Moro Street, no longer exists, but we have 17 years of memories of life there.

I am always glad to find photos of Leif I hadn't seen before, and this one made me smile. It was taken not long after he graduated from MHS, handsome, slim fellow with his luxurious long hair pulled back in a ponytail, his mustache and goatee, and the snappy stylish clothes he wore then; silk shirt and silk jacket.

It also shows his sense of humor and silly side. We were having a family dinner in the dining room. I don't know what came in the large white envelope, but he grabbed it and quickly fashioned a mask/hat and popped it over my head. I hadn't seen this photo since the slide film was developed in 1993, because it wasn't a photo we would have printed from the slide to go into an album, but now it seems priceless and cute.

I think of all the things I learned from Leif and wish he were here to teach me more. At the time this photo was taken, he was one of the early users of a cell phone, which he paid for with his own earnings from the telemarketing company he worked for, his first job, as a senior in high school. He taught me so much about how cell phones work (and why they don't work). I miss learning from him. I miss his political and historical discussions. I miss his laugh. I miss his hugs. I want him back.

Was it his destiny?

Someone asked me, a few months ago, whether I thought perhaps Leif's life and death were his destiny. I thought a long time about that. What does destiny mean?

The Free Dictionary by Farlex defines destiny as:
destiny [ˈdɛstɪnɪ]

n pl -nies

1. the future destined for a person or thing; fate; fortune; lot

2. the predetermined or inevitable course of events

3. (Philosophy) the ultimate power or agency that predetermines the course of events

How can we really apply that to a life? Because something DOES happen, can we automatically assume it was "destiny" and MUST happen?

If there is such a thing as destiny, can we change or avoid it?

Is destiny the same as "fate"?

fate [feɪt]

n

1. the ultimate agency that predetermines the course of events

2. the inevitable fortune that befalls a person or thing; destiny

3. the end or final result

4. a calamitous or unfavourable outcome or result; death, destruction, or downfall

It seems to me that the definitions rather beg the question. If the end result IS fate or destiny, then of course it was fate or destiny, but if we define it as "inevitable" and basically preprogrammed to happen, that's a different thing all together.

Or, is there a force called destiny or fate that DOES determine our lives?

I don't believe that, at least not in the usual colloquial sense. For instance, I don't think there was some guiding hand of fate that "made" me and Peter go to the Manhattan swimming pool one August day just so we could meet. I think that was a more or less random piece of luck that could easily have happened entirely differently.

However, I DO Think there are factors that determine things in our lives, some of the biological or genetic. I think that genes not only determine or heavily influence much of our appearance, they also determine many other things about us, from talents and likes and dislikes (some of them) to propensities to diseases or risky behavior or some forms of mental illness.

It's hard for me as a mother to contemplate that I, and perhaps Peter, passed on to Leif some genetic tendency toward severe depression, but with the family history on my side, and my father's suicide, and Peter's mother's severe depression, it know it is possible, and indeed probable, that he inherited the gene for depression and that it was activated during his miserable time in the army and he fought it the rest of his life. Perhaps he WAS doomed by destiny, the destiny of that inheritance, and perhaps it was only a matter of time for him, as it seemed to have been for my father.

My dad lived 13 years longer than Leif did, but he had much to anchor him to this life that Leif never had, a wife, four children, a career, a home. Even with those things, life became empty and he said he felt "dead inside." Leif listened to Johnny Cash's sad song "Hurt," which seemed to speak of what Leif was going through.

I don't know whether Leif had an exact predetermined fate, one that would end on that day, that exact day, with him taking his life, in that exact place, with that gun. I doubt it. What I do think is that he may have had a destiny to become depressed and eventually end his life, but the how, why, when and where would have been shaped by the events of his life. Perhaps if he hadn't joined the army, perhaps if his marriage had lasted, perhaps if he'd found a career he could get his mind into, perhaps if he'd felt he had worth in this life and that he mattered, he would have lived . . . but for how long?

In the end, would he have still terminated his life as my father did? I will never know the answer to that, never know exactly why did shot himself in the wee hours of April 9, 2008, never know whether he could have been saved . . . or if he was, for how long.

I have come to believe that we all face some destiny in our lives, but that it isn't all just predetermined, that it influences our lives but doesn't just determine it. We, and events, and the people in our lives, shape the outcomes every day with each and every action and decision. Yes, many of THOSE are in some sense "determined," too, but not every detail, just the broad outlines. We paint in the strokes.

Leif suffered, but there are others who suffered worse than he did who did not and will not take their lives. What could be the difference? I believe it was inheritance, the genetic disposition to depression and suicide, and I regret that I passed that on to him.

Could things have been different? I believe they could have, but his life would have to have been different, too. He would have to have made different decisions, found a path that wouldn't have taken him down the path of depression, or found a way out of it for a second or third time. But much of that was not of his choosing . . . the things that happened to him were the RESULTS of his choices, but all of us make choices without knowing the outcomes we will face, and he was no different.

Was suicide my father's fate? Yes, because it happened. Perhaps yes because of his genetic inheritance. Yes because of the damaging depression he developed.

Can we know our fate? I'm glad we can't, though sometimes we can see some possibilities or the broad outlines we face in life. I'd rather not know if terrible times are ahead. Nor do I want the happy times lessened by knowing about them in advance.

All we can do is make the best choices we know how, forgive ourselves for the ones that turn out to be foolish or unwise, and appreciate, as much as we can, the life and loved ones we have.

I will always be glad that Leif was my son, no matter how hard it is to know he is dead, no matter how much I miss him, no matter how much I disagreed with some of the choices he made. He was my son, my handsome, brilliant, anguished son, and he brought much to my life I would never want to wish away.
-------

The photo was taken of Leif by my sister, Sherie, in the living room of our old stone house in Manhattan, Kansas, in November 1975. Leif was 10 months old, and must about that time he started walking.

Are you over it yet?

Peter asked me on our bike ride yesterday whether I was "over" Leif's death after four years. I told him no, that I still felt like the man we sat with at a German American Club Christmas Party a couple of years ago whose 17-year-old daughter had committed suicide some fifteen years ago . . . that it still hurt just as much, just not as often.

We didn't continue to discuss it then, but today I asked him whether HE was "over it," and he said he thought he was. But then it occurred to me that so often we use words in different ways. What did "over it" mean to him? So I asked.

He said he still thinks of Leif "all the time" and misses him, but that life must go on and that he was able to enjoy our trip to Germany.

I guess my definition is different. I knew all along that life had to go on, and since Leif died I've helped take care of my mother through a broken back and a broken hip, and now am helping her with another move. We've traveled to Egypt, South America, Alaska, Germany, India and Russia since Leif's death, and I've enjoyed the trips. Most of each day I'm busy and functioning well. I don't dwell on his death the way I did for the first three years after he died. I cry more rarely, but I still do get tears in my eyes, and once in awhile grief still comes back for a pity party.

If being "over it" means being able to function and enjoy life most of the time, I guess I am . . . but if being "over it" means it no longer hurts or affects me, or that I no longer miss him, or that I no longer question and wonder why, no, I am not "over it," and I don't think I ever will be.

There is something so integral to one's life about being a parent, about loving someone so completely, that even if we can eventually let go of the daily depths of grief, we can never really let go of the person we love and miss so much.

I was thinking just today, again, of all Leif's things I still have and what to do with them when there he had no family to give them to, no children to wonder about their father, no grandchildren who would like having his things.

I was thinking of all the memories that we cherish, how glad I am to have them, and yet how hard it sometimes is to remember and know what we have lost.

There are so many days I'd like to write on this blog but find no time. The demands of life have closed in and taken away the time I used to spend each day here with "Remembering Leif," and it may seem to the casual reader of the blog as though I am no longer remembering as often or as deeply, but that would be untrue.

I'm glad I had the time in the first two years after Leif's death to write more often, even daily, to be with him in my mind's eye and share those moments in some inner way with him. Now those moments are fewer, but not because I think of him any less.

I think Peter, too, wishes for more of that time. He checks the blog every day and waits to see whether I've written anything new, tells me I should write something, even if it is short. He may be "over it," but he's not over wanting to see the photos and read about our son.

This photo of Peter and Leif was taken in the back yard of our old stone house in Manhattan, Kansas, in June 1976 when Leif was a year-and-a-half old. He had been playing in the little wading pool and gotten tuckered out, so he climbed up on daddy and fell asleep in the sun, all cuddled up, safe and warm. He must have felt so snuggled up and loved . . . and he was. It's a precious moment, to have a little boy asleep on you like that. They both were so young then.

Thirty-five Years Ago - Leif at Nine Months - Manhattan, Kansas

This picture of Leif when he was nine months old, thirty-five years ago in October 1975, was taken in the backyard of the old stone house at 804 Moro Street in Manhattan, Kansas. It was a beautiful, warm, Indian summer day, and he was having a ball scuffling around in the leaves. Leif started walking at 10 months, so it was right about this time he was learning to navigate on two legs, though he also did plenty of crawling in the leaves. He looks so happy!

I remember that he was barefoot and so cute tippy-toeing around.

I have to smile when I see what he's wearing. Back in those days, we could actually save a significant amount of money by making our own clothes, unlike today when we have all these cheap clothes from Asia. I made a lot of the clothes for myself and my sons, and it was during a time when the styles and fabrics were very different than now, too. I didn't make the little t-shirt he's wearing. That was from Sears, but I did sew the overalls he has on, and even put on the gripper snaps, with a second set to make it possible for him to keep wearing it a little longer as he grew.

No one would probably be caught wearing such things these days, or putting them on their kids, certainly not stripes like those! It's amusing and fun to think of that now, and I enjoyed sewing. I did some crocheting and knitting, too. Knitting was not one of my specialties, but I did knit a "romper" for Leif and crocheted a winter cap and matching cardigan sweater.

This is another photo that was badly damaged by age, faded and spotted. It has such a wonderful smile I'm glad I could rescue it with PhotoShop.



Fall in Manhattan can be very beautiful, with all the leaves turning and falling, deep blue skies and wonderful sunsets. That was an especially good fall for us, for now our family was complete, with our two happy, healthy boys.

He Loved Gadgets and Machines His Whole Life

This photo of Leif was taken when he was only nine months old, in the dining room of our old stone house in Manhattan, Kansas in October 1975. He was fascinated with my typewriter (long before the days of computers, and this one was a manual typewriter at that), and he wanted so badly to explore it and get at it that I put it on the floor and let him. He was completely absorbed in examining it, and I found that so interesting that I had to go get my camera. Then he looked up.

This photo is similar to one I have of Peter Anthony at about the same age, exploring the same typewriter. Both my sons were totally captivated by gadgets and machines, especially if they could either be manipulated or had some kind of propulsion. It was an interest they maintained all their lives.

This photo was badly damaged, not only faded, but covered with horrible black spots that came from black photo corners on other photos on the album page. I was amazed that I could rescue it this well with PhotoShop, and I'm grateful for the chance to see it again more as it was when I took it, and for the chance to see that intent baby look on Leif's face. It was obvious from the start that he was smart and inquisitive.

A computer keyboard became an important tool for him, but this was the first one he got his little hands on.

I Miss Him

Was I ever that young? Was he ever that small?

This picture was taken on the sun porch of the old stone house in Manhattan, Kansas on February 9, 1975, when Leif was only 12 days old. He was a big baby, but still so small.

I was worn out, but I was happy. I had Peter W., Peter A. (who was six years old) and Leif. Life seemed so complete and so full of the future and hope.

i haven't posted on this blog for a long time, but it's not because I haven't been thinking of Leif, not because I haven't missed him. Thinking of him and missing him are with me every day. Sometimes it's harder than others.

It was a joy to have Peter A. and his family here for a visit, the house full of the seven of us, lots of activity, lots of hugs and love, lots of fun, but it was all so bittersweet. I couldn't help but remember the times Leif had been there with all of us, couldn't help thinking how much he would have enjoyed going go-karting with them, racing his brother around the track. I couldn't help but think about the grandchildren I would never have from him. In an odd sort of way, having them all here made his death even harder, even while their visit kept me busy and distracted, with no time to write.

When they left, I didn't have the heart. I thought, I shouldn't just write something sad; people will think I'm pathological, that I should be over his death by now . . . even though every mother and father I've ever talked to who lost a child said they NEVER get over it. They just learn to keep living. They learn to deal with the sadness when it breaks through. I guess I am pretty much there, but those days are hard.

Tonight I looked at the Picasa albums of all the photos on this blog, over a thousand of them, and then the tears just came, again, like they did when I was talking to Peter A. when he was here, about how hard it is to know that my son was so unhappy he took his own life.

A few days ago, driving home from my mother's house late at night, I found myself asking Leif (expecting no answer) whether it had been hard to make the decision to die, whether it was hard to pull the trigger, whether he had to get really drunk to make himself do it . . . or did he do it because he was drunk and not thinking clearly? What did he think about those last minutes of his life? Did he think of us? Of his lost love? Of all the dreams he had that had turned to dust? Of his pain and sorrow? Or did he just think about how to load the gun and how to hold it so it would do the job completely?

Those are morbid thoughts, but they are the kind of thoughts the mother of a son who shoots himself thinks, though thankfully not all the time!

i also think about how his little baby body felt in my arms, how warm, how sweet he smelled, how his eyes were so alert and searching out everything, especially loving bright colors, how he loved to be held, loved me to sing to him, which I did every night when i put him to bed for at least the first ten years of his life.

i think about how much I miss his conversation, his laugh, his smile, the baby smile and the little boy smile, the teen smile and the rascally young man smile, the grown man smile. I miss his curiosity, his knowledge of technology.

I remember his quirky sense of humor and how he loved "The Mind of Mencia" and George Carlin.

I remember how he loved Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

I remember how he loved beautiful cars all his life.

I remember his beautiful brown eyes.

Soon it will be 29 months since he died. I will never forget, never stop missing him.

Leif's Ninth (and First) Home - Back to 804 Moro Street, Manhattan, Kansas - July 1992 - Summer 1995

In July 1992 Leif flew from Puerto Rico back to Kansas to stay with his grandmother, Marion Kundiger, and take drivers' education at Manhattan High School, back to the old stone house where he lived when he was born. He stayed with her there until we arrived in September and started renovating the house. I've already written about that.

He went to his senior year at Manhattan High School, but started taking classes at Kansas State University during the spring semester and graduated from high school in May 1993. It was during this time that he became active in the Society for Creative Anachronism, SCA, and began making his own chain mail.

The summer after graduation, he had two special trips, the one back to Puerto Rico to be with his friends there when they graduated, and the NCL cruise to the western Caribbean we took that August.

In the summer of 1995, he moved out with NIkko, who was then his girlfriend, soon to be his fiance and in a short time his wife, but the house continued to be an important part of all our lives until 2005.

The three years he lived there again he was 17 to 20 years old.
-----------------------
The photos are:
1. The front door of 904 Moro Street with a Christmas decoration on it. Taken in November 1998.
2. Leif at the formal night of the NCL cruise in the western Caribbean in August 1993.
3. Leif in his cap and gown after graduating from Manhattan High School in May 1993.
4. Leif at the Renaissance Fest near Kansas City in October 1993. He made the chain mail necklace and cape he is wearing.
5. Leif at Renaissance Fest near Kansas City in October 1993, with the chain mail necklace and cape he made. Note the earrings.

The Demolition of the Old Stone House - june 2005

Life is full of strange twists, turns in ironies. We owned 804 Moro Street for 32 years. Several generations of our family, from my mother, who lived there 16 years, to Peter W. and me and our children and grandchildren, my nieces and nephews and their spouses and children all spent a lot of time there over those 32 years. We took a vine-covered old wreck of a house and turned it into a home with a lushly green and tree-shaded yard, but the roots we had there, that "homestead" was to end in 2005.

When we bought the old place, the neighborhood was full of young families and retired couples, but over the years the student neighborhoods of Kansas State University encroached, so that we were surrounded by houses carved up into apartments. The street was parked full of cars, and so were what once had been back yards. Days were quiet but nights, especially weekends, were noisy and raucous. Houses were torn down to make way for apartment buildings. Landlords who rented the older homes out to students didn't take care of the properties and let them go to ruin.

It was during this time that Peter W. and Leif started campaigning to move to Florida. Both of them found the cold, greenless, bleak winters depressing, and for Leif, it was worse because of his cold weather asthma. He couldn't breath well. We started making trips to Florida to see where we might want to move.

At the same time, we were approached by one of the Manhattan developers who wanted to know if were were interested in selling our property. At the time, we weren't. We hadn't planned to move for another 3-4 years but not long after that, but an unusual lineup of events changed all that. the builder purchased the two houses west of us and was planning to tear them down (they were in awful condition) and build an apartment complex. He had already built one behind us. if that happened, our old stone house would be isolated on the corner, surrounded by apartment complexes. It became clear to me that the house was doomed. No one would want to purchase it if we wanted to sell it after the apartment building was built to the west of us.

One day in the fall of 2004 when I was walking to work at KSU, the builder happened to see me and asked again if we wanted to sell. Although we hadn't planned to move that soon, it suddenly struck me that this was our golden opportunity to sell and that no matter what, the old house was doomed. We decided to consider his offer. He asked how soon we could be out of the house if we decided to sell it. If he could get our two lots in addition to the two he already had, he wanted to build something different, a townhouse development.

in November 2004 we made another trip to Florida with Leif and found the community and a house we wanted. Leif had put a deposit down on an apartment in Tulsa where his friend Michael was living at the time, and was going to get out of Manhattan no matter what. It was clear that he was dying on the vine in Kansas, pining away for J. and not finding any career opportunities. He couldn't afford to move on his own and other than the fact that it would get him out of Manhattan, we couldn't see how moving to Tulsa was going to improve his situation. Although I couldn't make the move until a year-and-a-half later, we decided to buy the house and move Peter W. and Leif to Florida, hoping to give him a new start in a place he really wanted to go.

So, December 30, 2004 we closed on the house in Florida and moved Peter W. there, then Leif in March 2005. I stayed in the old house until April 2005, then moved to 710 N. 9th Street. The old stone house was torn down June 20, 2005 to make way for the townhouses.

Many people in town were angry with us for selling one of Manhattan's old stone houses to a developer for demolition but they didn't see how the neighborhood had deteriorated and what would have eventually happened to the house if it hadn't been demolished.

Before I moved out, we had big moving sales and people came in droves to see the house, inside and out. Leif helped us get ready. He wasn't there when the house was torn down. I don't think he ever looked back.

People asked if it was hard on me, seeing it demolished, as I was living on the same block when it happened, but by the time they had stripped away all the trees and bushes and emptied out the house, taken out the windows and doors, it no longer looked like our home, the one we'd lived in with our sons. It looked like a sad old derelict. I wasn't sad when I saw it in the end, just a pile of stone rubble.

I don't feel that way now. I know I can't go home there again, neither actually or figuratively, but it's gone just like my son is gone, and I had them just about the same number of years. There is no equating a house with a son, but their time in my life was roughly parallel, and although at the time in 2005 when the house was destroyed I had no idea that in three years my son's life would be destroyed, too, now I feel sad that the house no longer stands.

Leif would not and did not care, or at least he would have insisted he didn't. Places and homes didn't hold the same meaning for him that they do for some of us who are sentimental like me. The literal blood, sweat and tears we put into that house gave it a significance that another dwelling might not have had.

Leif never owned a home. Sometimes I wonder if he ever felt at home once he left this house. The photo of him in this post is the last on taken of him in that house, on December 18, 2004, when we celebrated a early Christmas with him, my mother, Holly, Chad and their boys, Tim and Natalie, because we were flying out to the DC area to be with Peter Anthony, Darlene and Marcus, and my sister, Lannay and her family, for Christmas. When I think of that house, I think of Leif. It was a part of his life for 30 years.
--------------------------------
The photos above are:
1. Leif Garretson, December 18, 2004, the last photo of him at 804 Moro Street, Manhattan, Kansas.
2. 804 Moro Street on June 20, 2005, after the house was bulldozed.
3. 804 Moro Street on June 15, 2005, ready for demolition.
4. The back of 804 Moro Street on March 15, 2005, before the trees leafed out the last time the forsythia was in bloom there.
5. The path along the west side of 804 Moro Street leading to the side door and on back to the white frame detached garage that stood on the alley behind the house. Taken June 1, 2005.
6. The big yard on the east side of 804 Moro Street, along 8th Street, taken on June 1, 2005, before it was stripped for demolition.

The Old Stone House in Mahattan, Kansas - Part 3

The old stone house not only represented the home we could return to (and frequently did) and the place we saw our extended family, it also gave us roots of sorts, the kind many military families don't have. Over the years we improved the place, added apple and cherry trees, a hammock in the back along with the picnic table. Leif was never interested in a yard and hated doing yard work, though he did get roped into some of it to help out, and he wasn't sentimental (or at least claimed he wasn't) about things like houses and yards, but I am a firm believer that in many ways geography has great influence in our lives, and that house and yard were part of our geography.

Leif was living there when he met Nikko, and for a time she lived there, too. He brought her there for dinner, back from the army for vacations and Christmases. Later he brought J. and her daughter there, and they spent one Thanksgiving and Christmas with us there. The house had to hold many memories for him, as it did for us.

It was not in any way modern. The fixtures were old, There wasn't a level or straight floor or wall in the place, as the old house had settled in the Kansas gumbo over the years. While we had put on a new roof, painted, refinished floors, and put in a shower, the house itself was fairly immutable. The yard was not. If you look back over the posts about the house, you can see how what was fairly barren and unattractive became a green oasis. Peter W. loved to go out and "inspect" the lush greenery an water it when we were in the growing season. Sometimes we had a vegetable garden. There were old lilacs and forsythia bushes that grew to at least 8 feet tall. Raking or blowing leaves in the fall was a major operation with over 30 trees. For half the year it was a lovely place, but the other half, when the leaves were off the trees, could look bleak.

The house had no ductwork, since the heating system was hot water radiators, and there was no air conditioning in it when we bought it. We installed one window AC on each floor and that kept it passably cool. When we move back into the house in 1990 both needed to be replaced and eventually Leif helped us put them both in. We appreciated his immense strength and his ability to figure out all kinds of mechanical and technological things.

We lived back in the house from September 1992 until April 2005. The house served us well and it was a significant part of Leif's life, all our lives.
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The photos from top to bottom are:
1. 804 Moro Street in the snow on February 2, 2004
2. 804 Moro Street in the snow on February 6, 2004. What a difference between a sunny and cloudy day!
3. 804 Moro on April 9, 2004 with the apple tree in bloom.
4. The northeast corner of the back yard on May 20, 2002. This corner was a favorite play area when the kids were younger. There had once been a swing set there. Peter Anthony once had a playhouse there made from a big old plywood moving crate, and later a hideout constructed of branches. Much later, Peter W. had a vegetable garden there, and planted a tree for each of our grandchildren.
5. The old fashioned roses that grew outside the sun porch windows on the east side of the house. They were there when we bought the house to totally overgrown until we cleaned the area out and trimmed them.

The Old Stone House in Mahattan, Kansas - Part 2

Leif lived at 804 Moro twice, once when he was a baby from birth until he was a year-and-a-half old and we moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, and the second time from July 1992 when he moved back from Puerto Rico until he moved out to live with Nikko, which must have been the sometime between the summer of 1994 and 1995.

That seems like a short time, but that house had been a sort of constant in Leif's life from birth in 1975 until it was demolished in the summer of 2005. While we didn't live in it all that time, traveling and living around the world, we owned it and his grandmother, my mother, Marion S. Kundiger, lived in it for the years we were gone. We came back there to visit, had family reunions there. In short, it was home, the home we knew we could always go back to, the one constant in our lives besides each other.

It was where he saw his grandmother, his Uncle Donovan; his cousins Rick, Holly and Tim; sometimes his Aunts Lannay and Sherie and their families. It was where we celebrated Christmas when we could.

After he moved out, it was still the place to go back to Mom and Dad's for dinner, for holidays, to celebrate Christmas.

Leif moved back there two months ahead of us in July 1992 while we were still in Puerto Rico, to live with his grandmother and take a driver's ed course at the high school. We arrived in September. Then the grueling work began. When we had lived there before, we didn't have nearly as much "stuff" as we were moving in this time and we consulted a structural engineer to be sure the house could handle the weight, and find out where to place it.

Although we had renovated in when we lived there from 1973-1976, and had worked on it several times during the intervening years when we were there for visitis, it needed a complete renovation again. This time, we decided to tackle refinishing the floors, knowing we would never manage to do it once we had everything moved in there. Little did we know what a mess we would get into. We knew that the first floor was oak. We rented a huge sander and ran it practically around the clock, the three of us taking turns with it. It was hard work, but it was nothing compared with the second floor.

The second floor was covered with old linoleum which was on it when we bought the house in 1973. By 1992, it was badly in need of replacement, or having something else done to the floor, and we decided to rip it up, not knowing what we would find underneath. We paid Leif to help us and the three of us spent days and days on it.

First we ripped up the linoleum, which we discovered was glued to Masonite which had been stapled to a yellow pine floor with a staple gun. Whoever did it had gone nuts with the staple gun and there were thousands of them. I counted over 200 in one square foot. Leif was so strong he could rip up the Masonite and linoleum in large chunks, which he threw out of the second story window. This left all the staples stuck in the floor, and some nails, too. In one chunk of the ripped up stuff, there was a long spiky nail that was sticking up out of a pile waiting to be tossed out the window and Leif stepped on it. The nail went right through his athletic shoe and into his foot. That necessitated our first trip to the emergency room that was caused by working on that floor. Luckily, it didn't continue to cause him pain, didn't get infected, and he healed fast.

Once we had all the linoleum and Masonite up and were faced with removing thousands of staples by hand, we also saw that the flooring was in lousy shape. It had apparently never been refinished after the house was built. The walking pathways were worn down to bare wood but those areas not trodden by feet for years and years were still covered with thick brown shellac. One place in the hallway was missing several boards and the area had been "repaired" by flattening an old turpentine can and nailing it over the hole.

The three of us spent days on the floor pulling up the staples until our hands and fingers were swollen and painful, but we finally got them all removed. About this time, I think everyone was about ready to curse me for insisting we refinish the floor. Then it was time to remove the shellac. It's impossible to sand off shellac. It just gums up the sander and starts to smoke. You have to dissolve it with denatured alcohol and sop it up, removing as much as you can that way before you can sand it.

Leif was removing a section at a time in this way, by pouring denatured alcohol on, spreading it around, leaving it for a few minutes to soften the shellac, and then wiping it up off the floor with rags and paper towels. He was working around the corner in the upstairs hallway, on the way to the back bedroom, when my mother came rushing up the stairs and around that corner because she had a doctor's appointment and hadn't been watching the time. She knew Leif was there removing the shellac and how he was doing it, but she somehow didn't think there would be a slippery puddle right in her way as she rounded the corner.

She slipped in it and took a terrible fall. She knew right away she had done something bad to her back so she lay still. I called the ambulance and they put her on a board to immobilize her back and neck and took her to the hospital. She had fractured two of the vertebrae in her back. She was in terrible pain. To my shock and surprise, they sent her home, even with that broken back, with very little instruction in how to care for her safely. That in itself is a long story, and we are just grateful that she healed and wasn't paralyzed. My brother, Donovan, had an old crank-style hospital bed that he got when the contents of an old hospital he tore down to build an apartment building were auctioned. He put it in our living room and I took care of her.

Meanwhile, we continued to work on the floor. Once the shellac was off and it was sanded, I had to patch innumerable holes with wood paste before I could apply the finish. While i was sliding around the floor doing this, I wore heavy jeans and sat on a large foam pillow to try to avoid the splinters in the old pine, but I wasn't successful. I got a very large one stuck in my fanny and had to make the third trip to the emergency room. Leif thought this was quite funny and loved to tease me about it.

Eventually, the floors were done, including putting in new boards instead of the turpentine can, and we went on to other things that needed fixing. Leif helped his dad install a split rail fence in the part of the property on 8th Street that didn't have a large hedge, helped paint, work on the yard, and much more. He had a lot of time, sweat and effort invested in the old place.

The old gravity hot water furnace was out into the house in 1904, according to a sooty old paper that was stapled to a floor beam in the basement. It had originally been a coal furnace but had been converted to natural gas years before we bought the house. Peter Anthony, who was four-and-a-half years old when we bought the house, thought it looked like a scary monster. It never seemed to disturb Leif, though. It's amazing that it was still working over 100 years later when we finally sold the house for demolition in 2005. What's amusing is that we found out that our neighbor when we children lived on Fairchild Street, Dr. Oscar W. Alm, had lived in that very house in 1929 when he moved to Manhattan, Kansas with his bride. They had a chance to buy the house in the 1930s but didn't because they thought the furnace was too old!

The photos of the house show the south and back sides, the picnic table we used so often, and Leif and Peter W. working on that floor. The odd thing is, we took many photos of the exterior of the house and yard, but foolishly never took before and after photos of the interior . . . or much of any shots of the interior except what showed up in the background of the many, many shots we took of people in the house for all the occasions we celebrated. The only time I systematically did take photos of the interior was when we cleaned it out right before we sold it, and then the rooms looks sadly empty and forlorn.

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The photos from top to bottom are:
1. Leif and Peter W. working on the upstairs flooring in our bedroom, August 1993.
2. The surprise Kundiger family reunion in 1993 in the backyard, held in honor of Leif's grandmother's 75th birthday, early on July 4, 1993. Leif is on the far left all in white sitting by his cousin Holly Kundiger.
3. The backyard picnic table, taken February 10, 1999.
4. The old gravity hot water furnace from 1904.
5. Looking at the southeast corner of the house and lot from the intersection of 8th and Moro Streets on March 18, 2001.
6. The east side of the house taken April 4, 1999.
7. The back of the house taken April 1999.

The Old Stone House in Mahattan, Kansas

I've mentioned the old stone house at 804 Moro Street in Manhattan, Kansas so many times I thought perhaps a series of photos of the places we lived would be interesting. If my count is correct, Leif lived in 17 places plus three military camps in Bosnia in his 33 years. Only eight of them were with us and I don't have photos of all of them, but I think they will give a sense of place.

When we moved from Germany back to Manhattan, Kansas in September 1973, we were looking for a house to buy. It wasn't a good market then and we weren't finding what we wanted, an older home with a lot of room. Then I chanced upon this house while driving up Moro Street toward Aggieville. It was a wreck. The house was totally covered with Virginia creeper vines, which had grown all the way up to the gutter and then back down into the yard. The house had 33 windows (counting the front and back doors) but you couldn't see into or out of any of them because of the vines.

We contacted the realtor and took a look at it. The inside was a mess. All of the rooms, including woodwork, were painted either an ugly dark tan (with matching drapes and carpet in the living room) or an ugly institutional green, in semigloss paint, except for one room, which had weird combinations of chartreuse and forest green and yellow and pink with a big boob on the wall. The place was littered with dead bugs and the kitchen had ancient brown linoleum on the floor and countertop, which was shredding. It had been on the market for six months with no offers and we heard stories about prospective buyers coming out covered with fleas, hence the dead bugs when they closed it up and fumigated it.

Apparently we saw the "possibilities" in the place, so we made an offer. They were asking $28,000 and we offered $21,000. Even in 1973 it was a cheap house, especially on a double corner lot, but it was so old and had not been renovated, that no one was interested but us. When we went to the realtor the next day and were told our offer had been refused, Peter W. told them he was glad, that he had had nightmares all night about the place and to just give him his ernest money check back. Well, that got their attention and the next thing we knew, they accepted.

We moved in, if you can call sleeping on army cots in the living room (because the place was unlivable) moving in, and started working on the house to try to make it a home. People said it must be so rewarding, but no, it was just grungy hard work, and as soon as we got one thing done, we either found something new wrong or whatever we improved made everything else look ten times worse.

Peter W. liked the Virginia creeper vines and wanted to keep them, but we soon found that was impossible. As soon as we opened the windows, we discovered that they were full of sparrow nests that smelled awful. We tore them all down, making a pile to be hauled away the size of a boxcar. Then the house looked naked and pitiful.

We lived in the house from September 1973 to the summer of 1976 and spent most of our spare time during those three years working on it. More about that and what the house was like inside in my next post.

Leif was born in the middle of this adventure, on January 28, 1975. He spent a lot of time in a backpack on me while I worked.
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The top photo was taken May 25, 2002, and shows the lush yard we had created over the years.
The second photo shows the nearly barren yard during the dead of winter in January 1975, the month and year Leif was born.
The third photo shows the house after all the vines were torn off in the fall of 1973.
The bottom photo shows the house as it looked when we bought it on September 8, 1973.