She's dead, bless her soul. But this is a little limerick about the landlady my brother and I and two other guys rented three tiny upstairs rooms from with the ancient bathroom down the hall in our sophomore year of college for $38 a month… Not bad split four ways. The bathroom was shared with two other tenants that Sadie swore were having an affair. He was a World War II vet with a hook for a right-hand and she was an old maid. That fall when we first came, Sadie paid us to paint the two-story house with cheap paint she bought from the Soo Line Railroad, awful pale yellow and rust red. We had to battle wasps high on rickety ladders to get the job done.

Sadie always greeted us with, "How's your liver?" I wasn't sure how to answer that. "Still livin?" When we paid the rent, she would open the door to her cottage (now gone) behind the big house about 3 inches with a chain on it from her darkened living room/bedroom with the TV on and with the stench of her pomeranians yapping below on multiple carpet layers while we handed the monthly rent through the crack to her. The university housing office banned her property the next year, and we sought housing elsewhere.

The house today courtesy Google maps. Our little living room where one of us slept is the window on the upper right. The cottage that probably was a converted garage behind the house is gone.