Exercise Four: Childhood House

When I was six and my baby sister was three weeks old, we were forced to move. We had been living in the upstairs of a two-family house in New Jersey and the old lady downstairs wanted to let her daughter live in our apartment. We had to find something pretty quick that was also pretty cheap. My parents scoured the area and were able to secure lodging in the cheapest house on the market in the whole county. Really. It was built in 1923, I think, and had many features to make it a staple of my childhood memories as well as my mom's nightmare house. :)

I loved the stove. First of all, it wasn't really in the kitchen. It was in a room all to itself adjoining the kitchen, much like the toilet is in a lot of master bathrooms now. Looking back I can see how cooking=hell in a place where you have to either prepare something directly on the stove with NO counter space, or fix it in another room and carry it across the house to cook it. It was such a novelty for me though. On each side of the oven there were panels that swung open to reveal drawers where we kept cereal and crackers. I have no idea what year the stove was manufactured but I don't think it was much of an upgrade from the original house. I've never seen another one like it. It made learning how to cook lots of fun.

My room was in the attic. There was a full set of real stairs leading up to it, rather than the pull down things I see now. I had a door at the bottom of the stairs that my dad cut to be a Dutch door. I had a sliding lock on my side of the bottom and the outside of the top, since they didn't like the idea that I might barricade myself in there completely. Besides, the house had no central air and was cooled by a huge attic fan that you turned on using a switch in the kitchen, so we needed to keep the door open to let the air out. I could lock the bottom half of the door to keep my sister out and escape upstairs, where I would lie on my bed and put my feet up on the slanty dormer ceiling. I could look out into the depths of the two big pine trees in our front yard and watch the sparrows peck each other across the branches. I shared the night with carpenter ants and squirrels who lived in the walls and came out to play while I tried to sleep.

When we moved in there was a fish pond in the back yard. It was about three feet deep and was stocked with fat goldfish. We kept up with it for a few months, and it was my job to feed them. I remember forgetting once until it was dark, and going out there in the pitch black because I really thought they would die before morning and it would be my fault. I took one tiny step at a time, trying to get to the edge of the water to throw the food in without falling in my own self. Scared to death. :) I was sad the day my dad drained it, but it was really fun to put the hose in there and watch all the water get sucked out onto the street. I ran back and forth to see how much was left about sixty times.

There was one tiny bathroom upstairs. It had an old-fashioned clawfooted tub and no shower. The sink was a pedestal with separate taps for hot and cold water and there was no cabinet space anywhere.

We lived there until I was 14 and I cried when we left. I wrote my name on the ceiling in my room, along with my *true love*, because you know, it was ninth grade and we were getting married. I couldn't imagine that I would ever love another house, that I could find one with character, or be happier anywhere else. I was wrong about that.

I hear the new owners have added another bathroom and put yellow siding on to replace the funky 3D kitty-litter brown shingle stuff that was there before. I bet it's not as nice now. But it's bigger. My mother told me once I was grown that it was only 1200 square feet. Full of love.