Last week I posted on Facebook this picture of the house where I grew up. The house looks much different now than it did then. I just spent a while searching for a picture of the house back then. I was sure I had one in the pictures I took when I was a kid. I remembered one of my cousin up on the roof to retrieve something we had thrown up there. I found the picture but it just showed him and the roof. Nothing of the house. I found other partial pictures of this or that corner of the house in behind people. This picture of my sister and me sitting on the edge of the porch at least shows the porch posts are the same. It’s not the greatest picture of either of us. My sister looks a little sick of taking pictures and I look as if I just got a bad perm.
But you do see the porch posts that my dad and uncle made. That’s before I can remember. Maybe before I discovered America as my preacher used to say about somebody being born. I’m sure my dad and uncle also poured the concrete for the porch.
We did love that porch. This sister and I used to rollerskate miles and miles on it around and around when we were kids. We had those old skates that had little vice clamps you tightened with a key to make them grip your shoe sole. You had to be sure not to lose your skate key. I still have those skates and the key around here somewhere.
At one time the house had no porch. No upstairs. No kitchen and extra room. It started out as a log cabin, but I don’t know who built it or lived in it back in those pioneer days. My parents moved in after they married in 1938. At that time, the house just had a fireplace to warm the front room and a cookstove in the kitchen. Those wood cookstoves did okay cooking but didn’t put out a lot of heat. Mom and Dad slept upstairs when they first went to housekeeping there. She said that when they would come downstairs in the wintertime, the water in the iron teakettle on the fireplace hearth would be frozen. She had to wait a while to have her first cup of tea.
By the time I came along, we had a woodstove in the front room that was our living room. Mom and Dad had a bedroom in the other front room. There were two other rooms downstairs – the kitchen and a room with a dining table that was rarely used. We ate at a table in the kitchen. In the winter, we closed off that room and called it the refrigerator because of how cold it stayed in there.
My sisters and I had bedrooms upstairs. I shared a bedroom with the sister a little older than me. My oldest sister had the other upstairs room. After she graduated from high school and got an apartment, my sister took that room and I had my own room.
That bedroom under the eaves was where I started writing my stories so many years ago. In the winter, the heat didn’t make it up to my bedroom, but sometimes I would wrap up in a quilt and write away in one of my wirebound notebooks. I begged Santa for a desk and a real fountain pen that I filled up from a glass ink bottle. Blue black ink. Had to have that color ink. Then I broke my piggy bank (literally) to buy a portable typewriter from one of my sister’s friends. I counted out pennies to come up with the last dollar of the $25 price. Having a typewriter made me feel like a real writer, but I still scribbled stories down in notebooks that I hid away in my desk drawers.
When a young teen, I started writing in a journal. I kept at it for years, and not until I began blogging here on the internet did my journal writing slow down. Writing here a couple of times a week scratches my journal writing itch even though I don’t write the same sort of things I might write in a private journal. I want to write something here that some of you might want to read.
When the writing bug bit me at the age of ten or so, I used to say I wanted to grow up and live in a cabin in the woods with a few dogs to keep me company while I wrote. Never got that cabin in the woods. Discovered boys instead. At a young age, I found the right guy. We married and I became a farm wife and mom instead of being a recluse writer. But I never quit writing stories and I always had a dog or two.
This picture is of the two kids who started out their lives in the same old farmhouse where I grew up. My husband and I moved in there after my parents moved into my father’s homeplace. The little boy in the blue sweatshirt is my sister’s son. He now lives in the remodeled house you see in the top picture. It has a new roof, new siding, new windows, new floors and more. But the step from the living room into the kitchen is still the same. The doorway is from the log room to the added on kitchen. The wide wooden step that was there in that log house when it was first built maybe two hundred years ago is worn down by who knows how many feet walking on it through the long life of this house.
Once that writing bug bit me all those years ago, I never recovered from the writing fever. I’ve written a few million words since then and have been blessed to have some of those words become stories that some of you have read. Thank you for reading my words.
What are the memories of the place where you grew up?
Comments 4
How fun to learn the details of your house! I grew up in several different houses since my parents moved more than once while I was growing up. I don’t remember much of the first two houses except for driving by them as an adult and seeing photos of them. However, I do remember a lot about the third house where I spent most of my “growing up” years. It was in the suburbs of Richmond, VA, and had three bedrooms and a bath upstairs and a living room, dining room, kitchen, and a half bath downstairs as well as a huge basement and a screened side porch. Since I am the baby in my family, I was the last child at home. My two older sisters shared a bedroom, my parents had a bedroom, and I had a bedroom. As my older sisters married and moved out, we played bedroom turnover. It was comical to see me get to the top of the stairs and try to remember which bedroom was mine–in other words, which way to turn. We also roller skated on the sidewalk out front using the clamp-on roller skates. Three houses in a row had children about the same age, so in the warmer weather, we played games outside after our families cooked out for dinner. Then one dad would pile all of us children in one or two cars to go get ice cream cones. Some of us girls would have sleep-overs. Such fond memories!
Author
Sounds as if you had a great childhood, Suzanne. I love the picture of you and the neighbor kids having a great time outside together and that dad had to be the most popular dad on the street to take you for ice cream. We lived out in the country and a good way off the country road. No kids around our way but my sister and I made good playmates and my cousins came visiting a lot. It’s good to have those fond memories. You can wish all children would.
Delightful look back at the house history. Loved my skates, too. Still have a scar on one knee from a tumble due to the clamps failing, but such fun! Earned a new pair by selling packets of garden seed to sympathetic relatives.
I’ve enjoyed many of your books. Keep up the good work.
Author
Thanks so much for reading my stories, Fern. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed following my characters down their story roads.
Those skates were great until the clamps got loose. Isn’t it great how relatives step up and help out when they see how much we want something?