Troy- WW5 (Eric, TJ, Lauren, Jessie)

We were on a road trip looking at colleges in New York when my mom and I thought it might be a good idea to visit Hullie. We were not too far from the dilapidated city of Troy, and Hullie would be one hundred and two years old that May. If anyone would live to be one hundred and fifty we figured it would be Hullie, but we figured visiting might be a good idea just in case. The nursing home, maybe two minutes from the brick house we so missed, looked out over top of the city that, if possible, seemed even more run down. The color of the sky was grey, the buildings were grey, and grey smoke billowed from a factory below. As we entered the nursing home, the smell of old people hit us, the smell everyone dreads. The smell doesn’t carry the same significance as cuddling up in grandma’s house with the smell of vanilla and fresh baked cookies. It’s the smell of sanitized hospital rooms, over baked food, and old furniture that carries the smell of everyone that has ever sat in that chair over the years with a musty odor. We found Hullie lying in her bed, glasses askew with their fake pearl chain holding them on her face, white curly hair spread across her forehead, and knobby knuckled hands lying across her matching sweat pant outfit. She looked at us, eyes widening and crooked smile spreading across her face. Her hearing had been long gone, it had faded when she still lived in the brick house, but hearing aids seemed to allow her relatively normal hearing. It seemed silly, but the hearing aids didn’t work on hundred percent of the time so people had to shout at her. Often she didn’t catch anything anyone said, so it seemed people were having conversations with themselves.