Our house

Thanks to Harriet’s blog post today, I’ve been taking a trip of my own down memory lane. I’d never thought in terms of floor plans the way she writes in her post. I think of the rooms and the floor plans as tied to specific memories. So in no particular order, here are a few:

My earliest memory is from before I was three. It’s more like a series of snapshot only there’s no picture of this in any photo album. My parents had not yet divorced, and I’m pretty sure we lived in Nashville. I still took naps in a crib but was entirely mobile. I don’t know if they knew I could climb out of my crib, but I could. My brother and I shared a room, and on this day he was asleep in his crib. I think my parents were napping too, or at least they were in their room with the door closed. I got out of the crib and headed toward their room. I looked under their door, and could see the sun reflecting off the wood floors. Then I saw what looked like slippered feet walking toward me. I knew it was a Very Bad Thing to be caught out of my crib so I scampered as fast as I could back to our room and climbed back in my crib and that’s all I remember.

My next home was an upstairs/downstairs duplex, also in Nashville. My parents were divorced by then and I was probably around four. I don’t have any pictures from that house, but we had a swing set out back and I fell off the teeter totter a couple of time and man, that hurt my head. I hated the wallpaper in my room, some sort of yucky elaborate floral thing but I liked the nice lady who lived upstairs. One of my favorite toys was my Raggedy Ann doll and I liked to twirl around and around while holding on to one of her arms. Well, the stitching between her arm and body gave way during one particularly vigorous twirling session, and she flew out the open window (we had no screens). I was horrified and ran out to find the rest of her. Fortunately I found her under a bush and no worse for the wear.

Then we lived in another sort of duplex that had the weirdest floor plan. We had half of the downstairs and all of the upstairs, which had a dormer roof. Looking back with my adult eyes, I think maybe the upstairs bath was added after the fact and actually the whole place may have been a single family dwelling originally. But it was very near Peabody, where my mother went to college, and I’m sure even then housing was in short supply, so it got divided up.

I learned how to roller skate on the concrete porch you see behind me in this picture, which I’m sure was really loud and annoying to our neighbor. I also made a lot of mud pies. Once I stuck the hose, which was still running, into a convenient chink in the bricks. It was the perfect spot to hold the hose while I was busy with the pies, until my mother came roaring out of the house because the water had come straight into the living room.

The bathtub in the downstairs bath was enormous. If you were a child, it was as good as a swimming pool. The upstairs bath was more normal sized, although scarier to my brother (he found a mouse swimming frantically in the toilet up there once). I wanted to love sleeping in the little alcove that was on the second floor. It had an exterior door but no stairs to the ground. Even so, I was always so terrified a burglar would get in and hurt me.

From L to R: me, my step-sister Cindy, 

my brother Doug & I think the stuffed

animal is mine. 

The house in Bryn Mawr is where I spent a lot of summers after my bio father remarried. That was actually a really cool house, although stuffed to the gills between them, her four children and the two of us. It was a Cape Cod and although the house you can see in the background of this picture isn’t that house, all the houses were the same in our neighborhood so you see what it looked like.

The house had two bedrooms on the first floor, along with a living room, formal (tiny) dining room, bathroom and eat in kitchen. The second floor had two more bedrooms, one was gigantic and they divided it in two, and a second bathroom. When they bought the place, the basement was unfinished. Within a couple of years, they’d made a family room, an office, a bedroom, laundry room and workshop down there. I was bummed by the changes that summer because we used to roller skate in that basement—you could get some good velocity going and then grab a metal pole to whip around and go even faster.

(Edited to add, I just really looked at the picture from Bryn Mawr and I totally missed that my wonderful stuffed animal, the Siamese cat, is in this picture. Do you see it? It's between the dog and whatever is on the left. I LOVED that cat.)

Plus the stairs from the second floor to the first floor had a sort of cut away with four decorative wooden poles—think mid-century wood poles and you’ll get the idea. All six of us would thunder down those stairs and grab a pole to whip around and land in the living room. You’d have to see it to really picture it, but it was a lot of fun.

The stairs were also my nemesis. They were wood and very, very slippery. I cannot count how many times I tumbled down those stairs. Sometimes it would be head over heels, other times I’d end up bumping down on my butt and making my jaw clack together and usually biting my tongue or lips, and sometimes I wasn’t quite sure how I landed at the bottom but I learned to be cautious on those damn stairs.

So thanks for taking this trip with me. If you haven't read Harriet's post today, you really should. You may end up on a trip of your own.