October 7: Old House

Urban archaeology is active in south St. Louis. All you have to do is put in a new fence and dig down past a foot and a half into the dirt in the yard.

Glass bottles, marbles. Doll baby heads. Pipes. Broken dishes. All of it thrown into the privy or the ashpit. The palpable reminder of people long dead who once called my house their home.

This doesn’t bother me in my new place built in 1927. Single family home small and cute. Ashpit, sure, but there was no privy here. But my old place. 1904. Old place, brick streets covered over by asphalt. A boarding house for 20 years. People in and then churned back out. I could never get the place clean of their presence.