My Homes I've Lived In-#1 & #2

My Homes I've Lived In-#1 & #2

Do you ever reminisce about the homes in which you have ever lived?

I can close my eyes and remember all fourteen of them.                        

The Green House in Buffalo Center built by my father: (birth-3yrs.) I was two or three and I had to stand on a little stepstool to reach the sink so I could wash my hands. My sister had painted a beach scene mural on the basement wall that had several pretty girls in bathing suits.

The Brick House in Buffalo Center built by my dad's father: (3yrs.-18yrs.) Before we moved there, I remember my Grandmother taking me by the hand into the dining room to get me some candy from the dining room closet. This is my only memory of her.

Siblings would hide me in a drawer when all the cousins came to play hide and seek. They also hid me on the top shelf of a closet. I liked to hide in the room under the front steps when family pictures were being taken. My cousin and I liked to hide outside under the kitchen window when our aunts were visiting so that we could hear family gossip.

Everyone liked to sit in the glider swing north of the house. It sat on an irregular shaped area that was outlined in concrete. I found out many years later that it used to be a fish pond with a rock garden on one end in which Gramma used to have lots of fish. When I was born, she forced Grampa to throw all the rocks into the pool and fill it in with dirt because she was worried that I might drown in it. I always felt bad that it was my fault.

My sisters liked to take me to school with them to show me off. I could recite all the US Presidents in order before I was five. I remember being passed around a lot because I had three brothers and three sisters all older than me and all in school.

At first all of us girls shared the biggest bedroom. Two girls each in two double beds. My sister Nancy wasn't too happy to have to share with me. I loved the lavender bathtub, sink, toilet, towel bar, glass holder, and light fixtures. My grandmother chose them. The medicine cabinet mirror over the sink opened so that with another mirror on the next wall, you could see the back of your hair which was helpful.

My brother Duey liked to wait until I had chosen an apple to eat before taking it from me. He said he knew that I would have picked the best one. After awhile, I would pick one of the worst ones so that when he took it from me, I could go back and get the best one.

My oldest sister Patsy moved to the basement when she was in high school. I remember looking in the bottom drawer of her dresser at all the love letters she had received from her many boyfriends. It was stuffed so full of letters that it was hard to get it closed! I got scolded for that.

I never did get any spankings from either of my parents. I don't know if that was because in their eyes I was good? or because by the time I came along, they were just plain worn out!

My brother Ray stood at the end of the driveway and scolded me once very severely when he found out that I had told some girl that he liked her. He told me that I might ruin someone's reputation by talking about them and that I should never do that again.

I had a crush on my 6th grade teacher. I cut pictures from countless old Christmas cards and cut them into circles so that I could glue them inside cupcake papers which I then taped to the walls of our bedroom in a huge wreath formation. Then I invited my teacher to come see how I had decorated my bedroom, but she never came.

My dad liked to come home at noon and take a snooze either on the sofa or on the radiator cover that was in front of the living room windows. It was nice and warm when the furnace came on! I liked it up there, too.

At the top of the stairs on the second story was a storeroom that went under the eaves. It was long and narrow and sloping and at the very end was a small window that you could open. I loved to go in there and look through all the things that my mom had stored in the two cedar chests in there. Old wedding dresses and quilts and uniforms and pressed flowers and other mementos.

When my sister Nancy left home, I got the middle bedroom and my parents moved into the largest bedroom. I had two closets, one for clothes, and one which we called the Suitcase Closet because that is all it would hold was the many, many suitcases from everyone in our family.

The kitchen was divided by an archway into two rooms, the kitchen and the breakfast nook. And in the breakfast nook on the light switch was a small red jeweled button. My dad told me that when he was a boy in their old house, his mother was always telling him to "go to the basement and make sure the lights are all out". So when the Brick House was built, she made sure that there would be a way of knowing when the basement lights were on... and that is what that lighted button was. When it glowed red, it told you that the basement lights were still on!

In the downstairs hallway at the base of the open staircase stood a little telephone table with a matching chair. My father told me that the spring before the fall when I was born, his own father suffered a massive heart attack on those back stairs and they called the hospital from that phone.

The phone was black with a long rectangular button that was depressed when you hung up the receiver to end the call. It was a dial phone, of course. If you wanted to know the time or you were wondering where the firetrucks went, you just dialed "O" for Operator and she would tell you because she worked in a little building here in our little town and not in some distant city.

To the left of the bottom of the open staircase was The Den. My dad had a desk and office chair in there. There were windows on two walls so my mom used to have plants in there. In later years she had her sewing machine set up on that desk and did a lot of sewing. I was told that before she went to the hospital to die, my dad's mother slept on a bed in this room.

My sisters and brothers would put up a badminton set in the front yard and lots of their friends would stop over to play. It was The Place To Be for several years, so much so that the ground was worn bare on each side of the net.

My grandmother's piano was in the dining room. My sister Patsy played extremely well. I loved to hear her play "Boogie Woogie". She also played piano at Sunday School and church. Everybody loved my sister Patsy. They told me my grandmother used to play piano quite well. We had all of her sheet music. Lots of it was from before World War I. I took lessons from my aunt one winter, but gave it up when it got too hard. After that, I taught myself.

My dad paid me ten cents for every hymn I could play for him out of our church's red hymnal. I learned all the short ones first and the ones with no sharps or flats. And then the ones with one sharp or one flat, etc. I never did get all the way through that hymnal. My dad liked to hear me play the piano so I did that a lot. One of his favorite songs that I played for him was "I Wish I Was Single Again" !

I was angry when my mom sold that piano to a friend's daughter, but I would get my own, someday.

We had a fireplace in the living room. But then sometimes a bat would get in and there was drama until we could get it to leave the house. Fires were nice, but your front side was hot and your backside was cold. Mom made Christmas stockings for everyone in the family and tacked them all across the mantelpiece. Finally, my dad boarded up the fireplace and mom put a big flower arrangement in front of it.

He also cut plexiglas to fit over most of the windows to keep out the cold in the winter, but mom didn't like it at all. I didn't either. I think i got my little bit of claustrophobia from her.

We always were having company. Relatives or missionaries. But at least the missionaries would bring gifts from Africa. I never knew what to say to them.

We got our first television in 1955 when I was five going on six. I watched Ding-Dong School with Miss Frances. Rinky Dink. Rocky & Bullwinkle. Top Cat. The Flintstones. Bart's Clubhouse. The Whirlybirds. Roy & Dale Rogers. The Real McCoys. The Andy Griffith Show. Paladin.

We only got four channels and three networks. CBS was 3 Mason City and 12 Mankato. NBC was 10 Rochester and ABC was 6 Austin. My dad had a huge antenna on the roof with a rotor box by the tv. you could turn the antenna which had a little motor at the base of it by turning the knob on the rotor box. That way you could tune the channel in you wanted until it came in the best. Many years later public television because available, but you had to use the UHF antenna to get that. It came in on channel 7. The UHF antenna was a big circle attached to the back of the set.

I loved to watch the weather sponsored by Golden Sun Feeds on channel 3. The guy would remove each one of the rays of the sun to reveal the temp, humidity, wind speed, etc. And then my folks would go to bed, thinking that I was already in bed, but I would have been hiding behind the sofa or a chair just waiting for them to leave. Then when they were upstairs, I would turn the tv back on and turn the volume way down on low and sit right in front of it to watch "The Midnight Movie" on channel 3. This is when I learned to love all the great black and white movies from the 30's and 40's. And at midnight when the movie was over, they played the Star-Spangled Banner and then the stations all went off the air for the night and all you would see would be a test pattern. And after several minutes, it was just white snow until the first show came on in the morning at maybe 7 o'clock.

Once in the early 60's we had a bad storm and an electrical outage that lasted for four days! Dad kept a fire going in the fireplace and we bundled up. We ate things out of the frig and the freezer before they went bad. But I do think Mom loaded a bunch of things up in baskets and set them outside to keep frozen so they wouldn't spoil. And at night we piled on the blankets. I was embarrassed that first night when I came to my parent's bedroom door and complained that they had an electric blanket and I didn't!!! My dad thought that was pretty funny.

My dad taught me how to make a lot of things in the kitchen. We made dollar pancakes together. He showed me how to make tea and cocoa and popcorn. And we liked to make homemade pizza together. And we experimented until we thought we had figured out the 11 different herbs and spices that were used in Kentucky Fried Chicken! He also taught me how to cut up a whole chicken. That was hard! He told me that I should always wipe off the table before putting food on it or I would disappoint my future husband!

And my mother taught me a lot about cooking, too. From her I learned to make bread, rolls, pies, cookies, cakes, candies, pork chops, chicken, how to always add a pinch of sugar to veggies. She taught me how to use the pressure cooker and the electric frypan. I loved to watch her cook. Her rhubarb dumplings smelled so good I could hardly wait to try them! And when she made pies, she always gave me the scraps of dough that i would sprinkle with sugar and bake on my little cooky sheet. I loved to watch her can. She always did green beans, beet pickles, peaches, and froze corn and apples. She would have a crock of pickles on the counter that would take a long time to be ready to eat.

I don't know what the original color was in the kitchen, but my mother painted it Pink & Charcoal which was a color combination from the 50's. In fact, when we moved into the house when I was three, my mom ended up painting every single room! I think she may not have liked her mother-in-law too much. I never got to know her because my dad's mother died when I was three.

Then, she re-painted the charcoal parts of the kitchen brown so it was Pink & Brown. That was in the 60's.

That house has both good and bad memories in it for me. Thirty years or so later after our mom died, I decided that I did not want to take the house as part of my inheritance mostly because I was very happy where I was... one block away in the first house that my dad's parents built way back in 1912! But more about that later.