The House With No Story

Atlas Obscura CEO Louise Story didn't have a plan in Bloomington. She just had the app, her kids, and an open afternoon — and ended up somewhere she never expected. We picked Bloomington because of friends. A couple we'd been close with in New York moved there four years ago when she got a professorship at IU. We wanted to see them. They didn't have an agenda for the day, so I pulled up the Atlas Obscura app and suggested two places: the Slocum Mechanical Puzzle Collection and the Captain Janeway statue. They'd never heard of either. Four years in Bloomington, and they didn't know their town held more than 30,000 antique puzzles or a bronze monument to a starship captain who won't be born for another three centuries. At Slocum, my kids worked through nearly every puzzle on display in the room—wooden geometries, trick boxes, ancient sliding-tile puzzles. My husband, the family brainiac, got stuck on one called Chinese Rings: six interlocking metal rings threaded onto a U-shaped wire loop. The goal is to remove all the rings, then replace them. It looks simple—just slide them off. But the wires block your way. You can't take them off one at a time. You have to skip rings, double back, work through a precise 31-step sequence. He sat there turning it over in his hands, trying every angle, while the kids moved on to the next table. He never solved it. The kids were merciless. Now they want a puzzle cabinet at home. Then we walked to the Janeway statue, and I became the narrator. I'm not a Star Trek person. I wouldn't have stopped for this on my own. But my kids were with me, and they wanted to know: Why would a town build a statue to someone who isn't real? Someone who won't even be born for 300 years? So I read the plaque. I looked it up in the app. And I told them. Captain Kathryn Janeway was the first female captain to lead a Star Trek series. She commanded a starship stranded 70,000 light-years from home and spent seven seasons making impossible decisions—the kind where every choice has a cost and you make the call anyway because someone has to. She was created by Jeri Taylor, a woman who grew up right here in Bloomington, graduated from IU with an English degree in 1959, and became one of the only female writers and producers in the Star Trek franchise. Taylor fought for representation in a room full of men who told her no. She gave Janeway her own hometown. And when she retired, she donated her life's work to the Lilly Library—the same building where my kids had just been solving puzzles. The statue was crowdfunded entirely by fans. Women who needed Janeway to exist. Who saw themselves in a captain who didn't apologize, didn't explain, just led. I stood there looking at her—this bronze woman on a pedestal in a small Indiana town—and I thought about all the times I've sat in rooms where men doubted me. The boss who once told me he couldn't believe he was listening to a pregnant woman lecture him about cloud computing costs. (I was right. He admitted it later.) The moments when being blonde, being a mother, being from Florida somehow meant I couldn't possibly know what I was talking about. I didn't know, standing at that statue, that I was looking at myself. I was just trying to explain to my kids why a town would honor someone fictional. But that's what sharing does. It makes you see things you wouldn't have seen alone. Our friends kept saying, "We had no idea this was here." There's something wonderful about showing people hidden corners of their own town. After we said goodbye, I had one more stop. Before the trip, I'd texted my mom to tell her we were visiting Bloomington. I knew she'd done two years of college at IU. What I didn't know—what I learned only when she texted back—was that she'd also lived there as a child, ages 2 to 7, while my grandfather did his doctorate. I'm 45 years old. I didn't know this. She sent me a list: 423 Jordan Street, her first house. University Elementary, K-2. The swim team pool with underwater windows where she swam alongside Mark Spitz. Teter Quad. The Hub. The gorgeous limestone campus with the river running through. I was rushing out the door. I barely read it. I saved the address and moved on. We found the house after saying goodbye to our friends—though the street isn't called Jordan anymore. It was renamed Eagleson a few years ago after David Starr Jordan's legacy as a eugenicist came to light. My mom didn't know. The address she'd carried in her memory for sixty years no longer exists the way she remembers it. The house sat up on a hill behind a concrete staircase. A two-story Colonial, painted pale gray, with white columns framing the front door. Evergreens crowded the entrance—junipers and arborvitae that had been growing for decades. A sunroom on one side. A brick chimney. It looked like a professor's house, not a postdoc's. More substantial than I'd imagined for a young academic family in the late 1950s. I pulled up in the car. I looked at it. I took a photo. I drove off. I checked the box. A few weeks earlier, I'd taken my kids through my own Floridian childhood— in the towns of Maitland and Winter Park. I showed them my elementary school and the historic Black town of Eatonville next door, how growing up beside it shaped who I became, why I'd written a book about the Black-white wealth gap, why equality causes have run through my life. They asked endless questions. They wanted to understand. The place unlocked because I was there to narrate it. But at my mom's childhood home, I had nothing to say. My grandparents are both dead. They divorced bitterly, and after the split, neither would speak about the life they'd shared. My grandmother—who I adored, who was gorgeous and put-together and thoughtful in everything she did, coordinated down to her jewelry, nothing unconsidered—she never mentioned Bloomington. It was "before." It didn't exist. And now, writing this, I realize: I never asked. I never pushed her to talk about the years before the divorce. I never asked what it was like to be a mother in her late 20s with a toddler and a husband building his career. I never asked what that house felt like, what the kitchen smelled like, whether she was happy. She died in 2021. I can't ask her now. I wonder—if I had pushed, would she have told me? Or would she have deflected, the way she always did when the past came up? I'll never know. That's part of the grief: not just that she's gone, but that the questions I should have asked went unasked. And now I'm standing in front of her house at 45—the age she was when she lived there, with kids the same ages my mom was then—and there's no one left to answer. Except my mom. Who's still here. Who texted me a whole list of memories. Who I didn't invite. Why didn't I invite her? I could have asked her to meet me in Bloomington. We could have walked up those concrete steps together. She could have told me which window was her bedroom, whether she remembers the backyard, what her father was like before everything fell apart. Instead, I checked the box. I took a photo from the car. I think about all the travelers out there with bucket lists. Checking boxes. Taking photos for Instagram. Driving past houses to say they did it. How many of them are actually feeling a place? Spending time there in a meaningful way? With the right people? So much of my 50-state quest has been meaningful—but I realize now it's because I've been sharing it. The puzzle room came alive because my kids were there. The Janeway statue mattered because I could explain it to them—and because explaining it made me see something about myself. I even showed my friends hidden corners of their own town. In other places, like a horse cemetery in Kansas, I met locals. But the one stop that was actually about family history, I did without a person who could explain it. I rushed. I checked the box. Some places you can discover on your own. But some places—your mother's childhood home, your grandmother's first kitchen—those need a narrator. And if you don't bring one, you're just photographing a house. Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo wrote: "Humans, not places, make memories." I'd go further. Humans don't just make memories—they make places exist. Without someone to tell you what happened there, a house is just architecture. A statue is just bronze. If I hadn't sat down to write this essay, I probably never would have thought about that house again. It would have stayed a photo on my phone, a drive-by on the way to the airport. But writing made me see what I missed. Writing made me text my mom. Writing made me wish I'd asked my grandmother the questions I'll never get to ask. When you get home from a trip, sit with it. Write something down—even if just for yourself. You might discover that the place you rushed past was the one that mattered most. And the people who can narrate your history? They're still here. But not forever. Ask them now. Bring them with you. I took a photo of my mom's house anyway. I'll send it to her. Maybe she'll see something I couldn't. -Louise PS — Have you visited the places where your parents or grandparents grew up? Did you bring them with you? Write me at ceo@atlasobscura.com with your thoughts on what old family places mean in your travels—and whether you've ever regretted not asking the questions while you still could.