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Friday, March 26, 2004

places I've called home

Because I lack the creativity, wit, cleverness, and motivation to do a real post, and have suffered from this lack for quite some time, here is my response to today's spark from diarist.net, just so I don't forget how Diaryland works.

What are the different places you've called home? Be it specific buildings and rooms, or cities and towns. Which was your favorite, and why? Did they each signify a beginning, an ending, or growing? Would you, or could you, ever go back?

1. The first place I remember living was "the yellow house." We moved in when I was three and moved out before I started kindergarten. This was probably actually the sixth or seventh house we lived in but I don't remember any of the previous ones. It seemed like a normal house to me at the time, but in retrospect I think it was quite small and old; you might even call it ramshackle. It had a big porch (at least it seemed big then), and a front yard with an old pump in it (I cranked the handle once and a bee came out and stung me). I learned right and left in the yard of that house and for years -- until I was at least ten, I'd guess -- anytime I needed to remember which was which I'd have to mentally put myself back in the garden, facing the bean-plant teepee, and remember that left was toward the house and right was toward town. I remember at least one Christmas here, when my dad built my brother and me a house out of our new Lincoln Logs -- and I got a doll crib, and my brother and I also got a typewriter. Almost as soon as we moved out of this house, the owner painted it dark gray, almost black. It looked like a haunted house for years until it was painted white with green trim (and black undertones). It was demolished five years ago or so, which was sad.

2. We moved from "the yellow house" to "the Plant", so called because we occupied the apartment above the garage at the sand and gravel plant where my father worked. We lived there till I was ten. Again, this apartment was really small, I guess (the property was sold a few years back and the ad mentioned a "possible upstairs apartment?"). And I suppose to most people it was a strange place to live -- but we loved it. We played in the rock and sand piles, and floated our decrepit old boat on the pond, where we also raised ducks. We started out with a few of our own and our flock grew effortlessly, because people would drop off ducks in the night once they knew this was a decent place to leave those ducklings which had been so cute at Easter but which had quickly become annoying. This was the best place in the world to ride a bike.

3. The summer before fifth grade we moved in with my maternal grandparents. I was excited about the move, and enjoyed living there for a while, but then two things happened: 1) I became painfully conscious of what other people thought, and realized that to an objective observer, the house was old, and... a little strange. (Pink, with a mint-green tin roof, for starters, and my bedroom had once been a breezeway and then been enclosed; much bare concrete was involved, and the chimney from the fireplace stuck out into my room) and 2) I became a teenager and had daily conflicts with my grandmother, increasing in intensity until I was fifteen and we moved out. Looking back, this was a wonderful place to live. Acres and acres of nothing around you but grass and cows -- which of course was another problem when I was a teenager and wanted to go go go and see people. But my brother and I had a wonderful time there, riding our horses from breakfast to supper in the summertime. This is the ranch where I would love to live again someday.

4. Next we lived in "the blue house" -- a new mobile home on my paternal grandparents' property. This was also a fun place to live -- I spent three years there and this was where most of my teenaged shenanigans with friends took place. It was the first place where I had a bedroom I could really personalize, so I had the stereotypical teenaged girl's wall covered with scraps of everything that had sentimental value to me -- dried roses, greeting cards, photographs, pictures, posters, banana stickers, and a strip of adding-machine tape going around the ceiling with socialist, falsely-deep quotes written on it in black Magic Marker. ("Man was the pariah dog, the moral leper...the muddier of crystal waters, the despoiler of forests, the murderer of the innocent" was one of my favorites at the time). I loved that room.

5. When that grandmother died and her will was a mess and her property got sold we moved back out to my other grandmother's ranch, except in our own house this time. I loved living there this time -- I was eighteen and appreciated everything (including my grandmother) much more. I only lived there a year before I got married and moved in with my husband into...

6. ... his little apartment over a garage in town -- the first time I had ever lived "in town" -- although the yellow house was pretty close. This place was a great little love nest and of course I have hundreds of happy memories centering around it -- the little bitty alcove of a room which we used for our books until we made it over into a tiny nursery -- the garage where where our cats had kittens and where we set up our computer, so that our mouse hands reached absolute zero when we played a game late on winter nights -- the little kitchen with its obligatory landlord-furnished glass-topped octagonal dinette table -- the nifty and ingenious built-in cupboards in the hall between the living room and the bathroom, which were practically responsible for the place being habitable at all. We lived there together for over two years, until our son was six weeks old.

7. Then we moved into the house we're in now, which is the "main house" about fifteen feet from the garage/apartment in #6. Anyone who saw it before we lived here would hardly recognize it on the inside -- when we moved in, it had new linoleum in the kitchen, but the bathroom was really bizarre, and the flooring throughout the house was in very sad shape. Not to mention the irregularly-shaped patch of orange, yellow, and brown shag carpet in the living room, which harmonized in a very 60's way with the dark knotty pine walls and wall sconces (these last two items are unchanged). Then it went through a wall-to-wall-carpet stage (meanwhile the bathroom got remodeled), until two years ago when the landlord (bless him!) paid to have the hardwood floors in the whole house refinished. yay, I am still besotted with them even today. :) We never thought we'd live here this long, and this was the year we'd planned to buy a house outside of town, but our housing market has gone completely insane so we decided to stay here where the rent's really reasonable and wait a while to see if the real estate bubble bursts, before we lock ourselves into a mortgage. In keeping with that decision, when the most recent tenants moved out of our little love nest next door, we started renting it also, so as to have a garage and a LOT more space. Now our son has a bedroom instead of an alcove in our school room, and we have space for guests and an amazingly cool, large, storage-bliss schoolroom. Aren't we lucky little homeschoolers. ;-) Meanwhile over the course of the almost eight years we've lived in this house, it's become "home" in a big, big way. All of our family's memories of home involve this little piece of property. Secretly I wouldn't mind buying it, but T's car hobby does not lend itself to permanent residence in town, so we have to at least hold out the possibility of buying a place with space around it.

And there you have it, whew! Maybe now that my fingers remember how to type I'll manage to post a "real" entry this weekend. ;-).