Only the memories are left

Yesterday, my husband and I joined my friend and her husband to walk through the high school that Cheryl and I had attended.  The school system shut down the building in 2010 (I think).  It’s sat empty ever since.  And now, a business has bought it, and they’re going to tear it down.

It was sad enough when Fort Wayne closed Elmhurst.  It was a good school.  The building was just old.  But it was depressing when the newspaper reported that it’s going to be demolished soon.  The company that bought it kindly led guided tours through it one last time before the building is destroyed.  The four of us went, but the tour mostly covered the new section of the building that Cheryl and I had never been in.  The only rooms we really remembered were the cafeteria, gym, and the offices.

I was never very active in school, wasn’t a joiner.  I was more of a brainiac geek who loved my classes and did a lot of homework.  But that school shaped me.  I had one of the hardest and most wonderful English teachers in the world.  If she assigned a five page paper, you were allowed five grammatical mistakes–one for each number of pages.  If she hit a sixth error, she circled it and quit reading your paper.  You got an F.  I learned to pay attention to grammar.  I took Latin for four years.  My Latin teacher made a dead language and its myths come to life.  I still love myths to this day.  They showed up in my EMPTY ALTARS urban fantasy series and some of my urban fantasy bundles.

Lots and lots of people stood in line to take one last tour of Elmhurst.  I know time moves on and things change, but it’s going to hurt the first time I drive past that corner, and the building’s gone.  Some things have more impact than others.  Elmhurst is a memory that made me happy.  I’ll still have that memory…, but that’s all.