A friend of mine said that you can tell a lot about a person by spending time in his home.

I had the great good fortune of house-sitting for Tom & Dottie a number of times when they were at the Lake and one wonderful eight-week period when they and Adrian were on a research project in New Zealand.

The last time I saw Tom was in June, when we sat in the living room briefly going over everything I needed to know about the who's & what's about staying the house again. He told me for the umpteenth time (at my umpteenth request) about the evolution of the house - what it looked like at first, what rooms were added when, which kids slept in which rooms for how long. He showed me again the inside of the cabinet under the stereo system - a cabinet they had deliberately not painted so they could show the original color of the living room - a very pervasive midnight blue. The last thing he told me was that, if his roses bloomed while I was staying there, to be sure to cut & take as many as I wanted.

You could sense Tom's presence before you even walked in the house. There were his aforementioned roses. And the walkway to the front door lined with - what else? - rocks.

Reminders of Tom's love of life were in every room in the house. The master bedroom has a framed hospital photo of Tom, Dottie, and hours-old Adrian. On his bedside were reading glasses and the most recent book. In the closet was a neatly organized row of pants, hanging on the rod according to waist size. On the shelf above was the camping equipment and Tom's collection of baseball caps and other headgear.

In the living room are memorabilia from their travels, the wedding album with Tom's children gathered around the newest member of the family (in the midnight blue living room!) Two photos on the mantel of Tom with his grandchildren piled around him; one show Tom with glasses perched on his nose, engrossed in some magical children's book.

The kitchen had all those wonderful cooking things they both used, and a photo of Tom in shorts & tropical shirt in a busy Mexican marketplace. One of the many magnets on the fridge was a Billiken, the blue & white mascot of St. Louis University.

On the wall in his office was one of my favorites. It was a nearly three foot long framed readout of a seismograph from October 17, 1989, at 5:04 PM. You geologists, and anyone else living here those 12+ years ago will understand - and not laugh at all - that Tom had a picture of an earthquake in progress as one of only two framed things in that office.

The patio had a bird feeder. One that extended on an arm out from the deck. Dottie said that one had to be careful in re-filling it, because Tom had greased the "arm" with cooking oil so that the squirrels wouldn't eat the birds' food.

I didn't know Tom as well as most of you. But I treasure the recollections of him that were all around what I came to call "the house on the hill". They - and Tom's memory will be there - as long as there are McEvillys and friends to keep telling his stories.