When Kyle Grillot and Rachel Mummey showed up to my house on 15 Maple all the way from Indiana to go to a workshop with me, I gave Kyle all the mail I saved that wasn’t mine. I had no idea he had lived here, but having graduated from OU’s photojournalism program, it made sense; all pj students pass on the houses to one another.
However, a year later when I moved to Carriage Hill with my sister Nasiha, one day a girl from the chemical engineering department called wanting to move in for only a month with us. She was renting a place somewhere on Maple street, but needed a little break from her roommates. I joked that I hoped she wasn’t living on 15 Maple. But not only did she live there. She lived in my old room! But she stayed for ten days with Nasiha and I, and after she left, I felt someone was just spying on me, for whatever reason. But maybe she really needed a break. I could relate to that. I left my three roommates a month before my lease was over due to some incident there…
But 15 Maple had this amazing laundry room in the basement, and this big monkey graffiti on the wall. And Who would have thought, two and a half years later, I’d find out it was done by Tito, my current roommate’s friend.
And my current roommate, Jason Gilmore, a pretty cool guy, made this delicious food for me my other roommate from the Balkan, Anesa Colakovic. (Yes, Nasiha and I don’t live together because I wasn’t planning on being here this semester, but we’ve done our share of mourning and crying, and now we’re neighbors who bring food to each other, so all is good). And we sat down to talk with Jason, and I brought up having lived just few blocks up, on 15 Maple. Well, Jason didn’t just live there, his parents owned that house and he lived in ‘my room’!
Now, I understand that Athens is a small town, but I gotta be honest, there are quite few houses around here not just the one on 15 Maple. But surely, all these connections from it make more interesting and meaningful to me.
Welcome to Bosnia 