A trip down memory lane

Fourteen years ago Mr Johnson and I were newly married and college students. I had a semester of school left and he had two when we tied the knot in July of 1997. Shortly after, we moved into an austere two bedroom apartment with all our worldly goods. We lived in married student housing on the campus of the University of Illinois, a community mainly inhabited by older international students with families, and married grad and doctoral students.

The bank of mailboxes on the landing of our building listed names we then could not (but now can) pronounce : Xu, Zhang, something African, Wang, Lu. And smack in the middle, JOHNSON. We seemed to stand out. There was some major foreshadowing going on, but we of course had no idea.

We lived humbly on peanut butter (but splurged on good bread), and would spend our time at class, at work, and occasionally, when the moon and stars aligned, at home together on our cute little plaid love seat (reappolstered by Mr Johnson's grandma) in our IKEA meets garage sale living room where we would watch a laser discs (it was the 90s people!) in surround sound complicated by the cinder block walls and eat Chinese take out.

(Little did we know that our life -- a little less than a decade later -- would include three wonderful little people, and an even bigger adventure that involved again: Asian neighbors, Chinese take out, and more concrete living room walls!)

This last weekend we drove down to Champaign and our old university/early marriage stomping grounds with our girlies ... taking our obligatory October photograph on the campus quad. The girls posed under the Alma Mater statue outside Altguild Hall. Later we snapped some more of the girlies on a cobblestone street in the historic area of Urbana.

We parked on John Street, just around the corner from That's Rentertainment (which is stil on 6th) where we rented laser discs in the pre-ipod era. We bought the girlies U of I t-shirts @ TIS book store. (Go Illini!) And ate at a great Korean joint reminiscent of a lotteria in Seoul.

We drove to the barracks style housing that makes up the married student quarters, which still looks very much like it did in the 90s. We posed on the front steps of our old building, watched as Chinese students headed back from the impressive garden plot that they work all summer, and now are harvesting di guo (sweet potatoes) and squash.

It was raining and a little bleak ... The girls were running the camera ... and somehow we didn't get a shot of the whole building, but I think you get the idea ... laundry flapping on the balcanies. Storage boxes piled up on them too. We peeked into an empty first floor and saw no updates. Still austere. Exactly the same as it was when we spent two semesters living on love in 202.