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CLEAN UNDERWEAR AND A TRAIL OF BOTTLE CAPS
For some reason The Red House has become party central for Nick and a few of his friends. What's even stranger is that all the friends who have come up to visit are his housemates in Brooklyn. That means the people he sees day in and day out all week have driven nearly four hours to hangout with him on the weekend. I'm not sure I understand this but maybe it's the fact that they actually like being with each other?
I've pretty much kept to myself the last 48 hours they've been here but have come up with one simple conclusion: the 20-year-olds are a messy bunch. Why is it that they seem to leave a trail wherever they go? When they decided to spend a day up at the falls, they went in the water in their clothes and when they returned, various articles of clothing were thrown around the house - inside and out. Wet jeans were laid out on the grass, wet underwear on the backs of chairs, wet socks were hung from the edge of the crumbling concrete deck. The smell of dirty wet sneakers was so pungent I was convinced the odor was wafting down into the valley below. Looking at their belongings (also thrown about in numerous rooms), I caught a glimpse of newly purchased packages of underwear -- six pairs to a package in sizes ranging from men's large to women's medium. Seemingly, this was to deal with the fact that they wouldn't have to do laundry or even bathe.
Besides the clothing, there were water bottles everywhere with contents that ranged from empty to half full to nearly full. Couldn't they just finish one bottle at a time and put it in the recycling bin? Besides the water, there were empty orange juice containers and many many bottles of beer. (These were always empty.) As if this wasn't enough, scattered around the deck were bottle caps and various remnants of food I can only classify as "snacks." I noticed a big blob of something black on the ground and realized it was a large colony of ants that had swarmed down on a lone (and now soggy) potato chip.
Besides the potato chip, there were at least three bags of nachos and numerous containers of salsa. In the freezer, there were veggie burgers, tofu hot dogs and TGIF boxes of mozzarella sticks. The fact that three out of four of them consider themselves vegetarian, while the fourth claims to be a vegan is puzzling since nearly all of the food they consumed was either from a box or a bag. Most of it was loaded with chemicals and falls under the "fake" food category in my house. The only time I saw them pretend to consume anything close to a vegetable was when I opened the grill to see what they were cooking. Sitting forlornly on the back of one of the grates, I found a single zucchini. Did they forget about it? Or was it the token vegetable they thought they had to cook in honor of their distaste for eating meat?
Even though we have six bedrooms one could technically sleep in, they decided it would be more fun to "camp." Outside that is. In fairness, the sixth space is structurally unsafe and there are only two sets of beds set up in two of the rooms but I thought our living situation was "camp-like" enough. After all weren't we sleeping on mattresses from Ikea that were only a few inches off the floor? And what about the kitchen that was gutted leaving us with no cabinets or countertops but a farm sink, a small stove and a fridge that was struggling to keep things cold? Did I mention we only had a couple of folding chairs to sit on and a small dining room table that I had found on the street? What about the fact we had no television, no cable and NO INTERNET service.
This apparently wasn't uncomfortable enough for them so they went out and bought a tent, pitched it on the property and hung out there. It hadn't rained the entire week. The night they decided to camp out, it poured nonstop for six hours. To their credit they didn't come in the house once.
Maybe it's a generational thing because I always cleaned up after myself at that age. If I hadn't my mother would have had some "choice" words to say to me. But the bottom line is when I was 20, I never ever wanted to sleep in a tent with three other people even if they were wearing clean underwear.
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