Public Storage No More!
Sunday, September 14th, 2025 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio |
74F tonight, going down to 61F, after a sunny day in the low 80s.
After a very busy four day weekend, I'm finally home, and have not yet begun my normal Sunday night, clean & shiny routines.
I didn't post last weekend, so quickly, I stayed home last SAT SEP 06, and comped, Spell I'm Under.
Then came the short three-day work week, with Colleen & Celina arriving late on the night of WED SEP 10.
So, THU, FRI, SAT, and SUN, September 11, 12, 13, and 14 were all about getting out of the storage unit, and ending the lease!.. as well as just hanging with Colleen, Celina, Kevin, and Brian.
Below is the great tale of the storage unit...
I slept in a bit and then met Colleen & Celina at Riverview Diner, in Montgomery, around 1PM, where we had breakfast.
They had driven to Illiniois in Celina's smaller sedan, so they didn't have a ton of storage space in their car, but this was known from the time the visit was planned.
After eating, we went straight to the Public Storage unit, which had not been opened since late July of 2024, some 14 months ago.
Upon opening it, everything was in the same arrangement, but very dusty, and many of the boxes stacked on top of one another had crushed down into the boxes below.
STORAGE UNIT CONTENTS:
A) Eight boxes containing family photos.
B) Six taskets containing misc. family documents: letters, keepsakes, cards, etc.
C) Four boxes of legacy china.
D) A box of books.
E) A box for Tim, containing a few items he'd wanted.
F) Donavan Family Bible (boxed) Circa 1856.
G) Box of Dad's old yearbooks.
H) Box of Donavan family artifacts (pull awl, wood plane, rug beater, irons).
I) Sacred Lock Box, purported by Dad to contain all his important documents, but which turned out to only contain ancient documents not relevant to anything.
J) Eight boxes of my journals.
K) Four more boxes of other stuff belonging to me like old computers, lamps, etc.
L) My small kitchen table (legs detached).
M) My big rug.
N) All the high quality blinds from Melody Manor (10).
O) All the 12V landscape lights, transformers, wires, and cameras.
P) My solid body Gibson electric Bass (1975), in it's hard case.
Q) A gigantic novelty coffee cup, made of porcelain, reading: Chicago!
R) My DeWalt 40V electric lawn mower.
The first job was to move shit out of the way and get all my own stuff into the RAV4, if possible, starting with the journals.
The journals all fit in there fine, and there was room for my computers and lamps.
I managed to get the table and it's legs in there, and the big rug... though that had to be folded rather than left in a roll.
And I had room for a few of the family things like the Donavan artifacts, and lock box.
However, there was no room for my bass guitar.
As I've written in past entries, all of this will have to stay in my van for the foreseeable future!
If I can graduate from my cramped studio apartment to a 1BR in the next calendar year, I'll be able to use the rug, table, and extra lamps.
Whether or not I get a 1BR, I intend to start digitizing the old journals, one box at a time, until they're gone.
Colleen & Celina managed to find space for all of the china, and the box of books, both of which Sheila had wanted... Tim's box, the landscape lights, a couple of the blinds, the rug beater and irons, and Dad's yearbooks.
They'd have room for a bit more after we shipped the books to Sheila, and the other box to Tim.
We were there for about an hour, with the sun beating down on us, on a cloudless 85F day, so it was kinda exhausting.
There was a LOT still left in the unit, but we closed her up and went back to their motel, which was by the train station, not far from my tower, downtown.
After the girls got settled in a bit, and fixed up, we walked over to the roundhouse for appetizers and drinks.
Kevin was on a plane, bound for O'hare, wich landed at 6PM.
We left the roundhouse about 7PM, with the sun going down, with Kevin on a train, bound for our train station, here in Aurora.
He would not be staying at the motel with Colleen and Celina, as he'd lined up a small Airbnb room for himself, but it was still close to the tower downtown.
Waiting for Kevin, we sat out on the front veranda of the hotel.
I had a 24 pack of beer delivered to me there, via Uber Eats, and so I was able to drink and smoke, as I chatted with Colleen & Celina.
Still on the train, Kevin ordered himself Chinese food to be delivered to the hotel, in advance of his arrival, and I agreed to receive it for him... but then he wound up beating the delivery to us... appearing out of the shadows, on foot, with his backpack and small luggage dolly.
After hugs and greetings, Kevin sat down with us on the veranda, and his food arrived a few minutes later.
We sat out there for a few hours talking, drinking, etc.
Around 10PM, I drove Kevin to his Airbnb on nearby Rosewood Avenue... about 1/4 mile from the island and the tower.
I hung out with him there for a bit and then returned home.
Friday was the day Brian & Karen were going to come, with their truck, like the cavalry, to rescue all the family photos... but he wasn't gonna arrive until 7PM.
I was up by 11AM, and had made my coffee.
Colleen & Celina were still waking up too, as was Kevin, who'd walked to a nearby coffee shop, across the river from his room on Rosewood.
After we all separately had our morning coffee, Kevin walked toward the tower, and I walked toward him, with us meeting at the corner of River & Downer, and from there we walked to my parking garage, and drove out to West Plaza to rendezvous with Colleen & Celina, at a restaurant called, Syrup, which was near the UPS store.
We all had breakfast together at Syrup, and afterward went to the UPS store to ship Sheila her box of books from the old family bookcase in the livingroom... collected works of Poe, also Huck Finn, and Emily Post's Ettiquite guide from the 50s.
And also to ship Tim his box, with dad's old black trench coat (for Frankie), one of Mom's music-box angels (for Veda) and a few other items for Tim himself.
Colleen was gonna pay for Sheila's box, and I was gonna pay for Tim's, but Kevin generously stepped in and paid to have both boxes shipped!
With that done, Colleen & Celina had a date to rendezvous with Colleen's other daughter, Jen, who's Celina's half-sister, at an outlet mall on the north side of town.
Kevin and I parted way with them for the afternoon, going, at Kevin's behest, to the dispensery.
After he bought his gummies, and a couple smokable roaches, he wanted to see my apartment, so we came back here, got stoned, and just hung out for several hours, going down mental rabbit holes about life and the universe... and sharing stories of our lives over the past few years.
It was probably one of the purest, brotherly bonding sessions I've had with Kevin in a couple decades!
As we talked, the sun slowly crept closer to the horizon, with my room getting dark enough, I lit some candles.
But because we were stoned, and so engrossed in our conversations, we missed a couple texts from Brian, asking the group where he was supposed to be heading!.. what was the address?
Colleen & Celina had also missed the texts, as they were very involved in their shopping spree with Jen!
Almost at the same moment, Kevin, here in the tower, and Colleen, out there at the mall, saw the final text from Brian, which had come in around 6:30PM, saying like, Okay nobody wants to tell me where to go, and it's getting too late! I'm staying home tonight. You guys are obviously having too much fun or something.
And this was a HUGE crisis!.. because we were all utterly depending on Brian to rescue the damn family photos!
Kevin texted an apology, and asked Brian to reconsider, but there was no response.
A minute later, Colleen texted us saying she'd called him and guilted him into coming!
HOORAY!
Long about 8PM, fully star-dark outside, Brian texted Kevin that he was nearing the Airbnb on Rosewood, so we hustled back to the van in the garage and drove over there, to find Brian standing outside, waiting for us.
Kevin let him into the room, as Brian had to pee, while I parked my van.
Instead of coming with Karen, in their truck, Brian had come by himself, in their sedan!
So... was there enough room in this car for all the stuff we needed him to take?
Brian had known about the 8 boxes of family photos, but not about the six other taskets full of legacy documents and keepsakes... because I'd forgotten about them until we'd opened the unit again yesterday, after a year.
But Brian bringing the car instead of the truck wasn't our only problem.
Colleen & Celina were now on their way, but had taken a detour to run a few errands, which... in girl time... meant it might be another hour until they got to the Airbnb!.. but Public Storage was closing at 9PM!
We had to make it to make it to that gate before 9PM, to get onto the grounds!.. and I had no idea if we'd be able to get back out again, if we lingered past 9PM!
Long about 8:20 we simply had to go!
We texted Colleen & Celina to re-rout and meet us at the storage place instead.
Kevin got into Brian's car, I got into my van, and we headed out into the dark, Friday night traffic, racing to the ouskirts of town.
Brian took a different rout than I did, so I got to the gate first, around 8:35, with Colleen & Celina pulling up behind me at 8:37, but Brian & Kevin had gotten LOST!!!
Kevin called me and I guided them in.
With the app, I opened the gate at 8:40PM, and our three vehicles rolled into the grounds of the storage facility.
I threw open the storage unit door, and we had to use car headlights to see what we were doing, but the mad assignment was on, to get all the photos into Brian's trunk, and back seat.
Was there gonna be room for the six taskets?
Brian balked about the taskets... this wasn't part of the deal!
Colleen argued he should at least take them back to the Airbnb so we could go through them to see what was in them.
Brian agreed, and he did manage to get all six crammed into his car, along with the eight boxes of prized family photos.
There was still shit left in the unit, but we didn't have time to worry about it.
I closed and locked the bay door, and we all jumped into our cars and rushed back to the gate, escaping the facility at 8:58PM!
Back at the Airbnb, with pizza on the way, two taskets were brought into the flat, and we began to examine their contents.
These were the taskets that Tim had filled, back in February of 2023, right after Dad's death, as he went through every drawer and cabinet in the house, sorting out what was garbage, and what was worth potentially keeping.
Tim had not had time to currate each tasket, but rather just tossed the good stuff in randomly, as he found it, until one was full... and then he'd start another.
The one exception to this was a tasket he'd prepared at my request with Mom & Grandma's journals, and some other legacy A/V material... which was already in my van.
We dug into our two randomly chosen mystery taskets with the idea that we'd do a further sorting of what was good, and what was garbage, but pretty quickly it became clear there wasn't much garbage.
Most of it was gold!.. old letters from different ancestors to one another. Birth certificates, old driver's licenses, random photos, little newspaper clips about different ancestral family members doing this, or acheiving that...
It only took about ten minutes for Brian to say, Okay, nevermind, this is all too priceless to throw away, so I will take all this stuff back home with the photos!
Thus, when the pizza arrived, we were just digging through things to reminisce, with no pressure to sort or prioritize things.
However, I did amass a small pile of things I wanted to take back with me, which went into my backpack.
I do, afterall, have a bit more storage now, thanks to that small chest of drawers I managed to squeeze into my studio apartment a few weeks ago.
Around midnight, things broke up.
Colleen & Celina went back to their motel.
Brian had been drinking, so Kevin offered to drive him back to DeKalb, and then take an Uber back to Aurora.
I'd been drinking too, but the Rosewood Airbnb is so close to the tower, I wasn't worried about the two minute drive back to my parking garage.
I got home safe, quickly.
Kevin piloted the precious cargo back to DeKalb, hung out with Brian for a bit, and then caught an Uber back to his flat in Aurora, hitting the sack there, around 2AM.
Around 4AM, a huge thunderstorm passed directly over, with brilliant flashes of lightning, and thunder so loud, it woke me up.
I lay listening to it for a while, thinking it was a sign from the ancestors... those previous four generations of the family who had lived in the house before us... throwing a punctuation mark on our successful salvation of the family legacy... a year after we'd lost the house.
But there was still some final crap in that storage unit to deal with.
When I woke, Colleen, Celina, and Kevin were all at Jake's Bagels, across from the train station, having breakfast sandwiches and coffee.
The bagel shop was closing soon, but they were outside on the deck, so they ordered me a sandwich and, after making my own coffee at home, I drove over to join them there.
It was a cooler, breezier, cloudier day, with the first flashes of yellow and red coming into the leaves of the trees there by the river.
As we ate, we strategized about the final ops for the storage unit.
Kevin and I arrived at the unit before Colleen & Celina, and our first order of business was the lawn mower... the white elephant of the whole affair.
We wheeled it out through the gate onto the roadside, into a no-man's land between Public Storage, and the sports facility next door.
And there we left it, to hopefully be snatched up by a passer by.
Colleen & Celina joined us back at the unit not long after this.
With a pocket knife, I broke down three empty boxes and stuffed them into my van, while Colleen measured the remaining blinds to double check if she could use any of them.
She could not, but she crammed them into her car to take across the road to the GoodWill.
I strapped my bass guitar/case to the roof rack of my van with bungee cords.
this left only the huge, novelty coffee cup, which Celina held in her lap to take to the GoodWill.
Having successfully emptied the unit, I removed the lock, which belongs to me, and we closed the door!
Colleen had already notified Public Storage of our vacating the unit, so... we were OUT!
Today was Colleen's actual 50th high school reunion... the original reason for her visit, so again, we parted ways, leaving the Public Storage facility.
Colleen & Celina went to the GoodWill, but would then return to the hotel, before going to the reunion.
Kevin and I headed out to run a few errands.
But YES... by the time we left PS, the DeWalt lawnmower was gone!
Kevin and I went driving into the old neighborhood and stopped in front of the house to have a look at how things had changed.
New windows, no more front bushes, etc... but then we drove around to the opposite side of the block and got out of the van to peer into the back yard!
And there we saw them!.. a young mexican couple, early 30s, with two young daughters!
They were all in the back yard, on this sunny September Saturday, just playing and puttering around.
They seemed very happy, and the house also seemed happy.
It was a nice moment of closure.
After that, we picked up some toilet paper and garbage bags for Kevin, then I got gas, smokes and beer.
We went back to his Airbnb, and I collected all the garbage from the night before... beer cans, pizza boxes, and other refuse from sorting thorugh those two taskets... threw all that into the passenger seat of my van, and headed off to my building... leaving Kevin to take a nap at his flat.
Back at my building, I parked in the loading zone, and propped open the door to the trash room.
Into the dumpster, I threw the garbage from Kevin's flat, and those broken down cardboard boxes from the unit.
And then I got the bass guitar, in it's case, down off the roof rack and put it on the table in the trash room where we leave things for people to take for free.
Opening the case, I took a last photo of this guitar and said my goodbyes to it.
I'd gotten that thing, used, at a music store downtown in 1995, and it had been my pride and joy through to 2009, when I finally gave up with music.
But it stayed with me for another 16 years, wherever I lived.
But my callouses are long gone, and my old hands aren't up to playing the thing anymore, so... with nowhere to store it... this was for the best!
Two hours later, when I came back down from my flat to rejoin Kevin, the bass and it's case were gone!
I picked up Kevin at 6:10PM, and we came back to the island, and went to ArtHouse, the restaurant/bar across the street from the Tower, to have dinner and a couple drinks.
It was dark by the time we were done, and after a brief stroll through the downtown, we returned to the Airbnb, where we were met by Colleen & Celina, who were done with the reunion.
FINALLY, we could all just chill in Kevin's livingroom, and relax!
All the hard work was done.
Dylan called from California, and we put him on speaker.
Dylan ended up hanging with us the rest of the evening!
Colleen & Celina left around 10PM, but Kevin, Dylan, and I hung out there talking until midnight.
I was up again today by 11AM.
Around noon, I picked up Kevin and we met Colleen & Celina at Riverview Diner in Montgomery... where this whole thing had begun last Thursday morning.
We ate, we talked, we drank our coffee.
And afterward, we went out to Mount Olivet cemetery, to visit Dad & Mom's grave.
The grass over the spot where Dad's urn had been buried... which had been burnt and brown upon my last visit here, with Colleen, in July of 2024... just after the foreclosure crisis... was now green!
I took it as a sign that his soul was finally at rest.
The last time we'd been here... that storage unit had only just been loaded up with all the family memories I could save from the sinking ship... and I'd only just moved to my studio apartment in the tower.
The flippers had not yet begun their renovations to the old place, and it's new family was still months away from moving in.
Today, however... Brian had just texted us a couple pics of all those boxes and taskets of priceless memorabilia, safely stacked in his spare bedroom against one wall, with his cat, Choo Choo, sitting on top of them, very comfortably, but somewhat attentively, as if guarding over them... and using her feline energy to calm what traumatic ghostly vibes might remain.
I nearly cried, when I saw that.
And above it all... Mom & Dad's framed wedding photo, hanging on the wall.
Perfect!
Colleen, Celina, Kevin and I went off in search of the Donavan grave... and we found it pretty quickly.
Daniel & Elen Donavan, the immigrant Irish couple who'd started it all, and built the house that would stay in the family for five generations.
We paid our respects to them, and then it was time for Colleen and Celina to head out on the long drive back to Connecticut.
Now it was just Kevin and I... and we decided to go across the road to Spring Lake cemetery, in search of the grave of Solemnus Seamans... the wealthy lumber baron who'd married Nellie Donavan, one of the five original Donavan kids.
Nellie's marriage to this local rich guy, back in the late 1800s, when Aurora was a boom town, was a thing of family legend, and also made it possible for the Donavans to move their little cottage from the bog beyond the town limits, to Jackson Street, where it sits today.
And It was Nellie & Solemnus who no doubt helped fund the building of the additions to that cottage, once it was on Jackson street, to become the house we all knew and loved.
I had only been to the Seamans grave once, with Dad, several years ago.
I had only the vaguest idea where it was.
But we strolled through the cemetery, asking Lem for guidance, and after a long while, we were ready to give up.
And then I turned and saw the huge headstone... about 20 feet away... "SEAMANS".
Back during the evacuation crisis, when I was looking for a place to go, and finding nothing... on an evening when I was worrying aloud to myself, about possibly winding up homeless, my phone had rung with a notification.
It was Ancestry, out of nowhere, saying it had found a new hit for Solemnus Day Seamans!
I felt in that moment, that the spirit of this man, wanted me to know, he was going to help.
And I found the studio apartment the next day... right smack in downtown Aurora... his workplace and wheelhouse, as a prominent city leader.
So, managing to find his grave today... to pay our respects... was just an extra bonus win, after a very successful four-day weekend of tying up loose ends.
And now I know how to find him again in the future.
Kevin and I rounded out the day with him doing his laundry in my building laundry room, and us in the little bar in the base of the tower, having a couple drinks.
When his laundry was dry, I drove Kevin back to his Airbnb for the last time, and we hugged our goodbyes.
He'll be checking out and leaving in the morning, as I head back to work.
At the peak of the evacuation crisis, scrambling to find a flipper to buy the house before the bank could seize it, and desperate to find a place to go, Colleen had provided her credit card as the payment method to obtain the Public Storage unit.
It was on me to pack all of it's contents, as I rushed to pack my own things for the move.
Then, for the next year, PS auto-deducted it's monthly fee from Colleen's card, and I would venmo her half, to cover my own things in that unit... but they kept slowly jacking up the price, every four months!
This September 2025 visit was the first, since the big family reunion back at the house in October 2023, when Dad's urn was buried... and when I still thought the house was safely mine to keep.
That last, full reunion, had been the first ever to take place without either Mom OR Dad.
This partial reunion was the first ever to take place without the HOUSE!
But we proved, this past weekend, that our family ties remain as strong as ever!
We gathered in borrowed spaces... a hotel veranda... an Airbnb... but we gathered!
We joked, and laughed, and drank... walked the streets... patronized the pubs and eateries... strolled the graveyards... trolled the old neighborhood (Colleen & Celina took some video & photos of the house this morning, discreetly), and had a good old time!
But we also saved the legacy from it's year long limbo.
°¦}
