The memories that have come flooding back to me since being in Provo are not all about the glory days. Since we live in a dump, I've begun to recall that for some reason, it seems to be a rite of passage for young BYU marrieds to live in a terrible apartment for at least a semester while they are students. When I stop to think about it, almost all of our married friends lived in semi-squalor at one time or another during their BYU careers. (Jeremy and I missed out on that experience since we were married undergrads for only about 3 weeks.)
I remember one couple whose apartment was kind of just one room, and to regulate the temperature of the oven you had to crack open its door a certain number of inches, and the apartment was deep, deep inside of a house's basement. Another couple lived in a converted office building and so they had industrial fixtures in their kitchen - I think their sink was more like a bathtub. This is in addition to Jeremy's cousin Allison, who told me that they lived in an old dentist's office so there were faucets coming out of the walls everywhere. A girl I worked with lived in a basement apartment where spiders threatened to overtake her and her husband. Seriously - she would find them in the shower, in the kitchen, and crawling in their bed at night. That same apartment had no cabinets, at all. Anywhere.
Please understand that I firmly believe that living in a dump builds character. I'm just really at a loss to figure out why all these wholesome Mormon newlyweds throw their sense of residential decency to the wind and choose to live somewhere that could probably be declared unfit for children if anyone were to look into it.
Here's a gem I saw while walking to the library today. This is the side of the building, which had TRUMAN written on the front and appears to have once been a (haunted?) warehouse or factory at some point.
Does this house look disconcerting to anyone else?
What are your apartment stories? Laura has one here (it's from Tucson). Is this crappy married housing thing specific to BYU or universal?