Home Sweet Homes

This prompt comes via Writing Fix. For a link to the site visit the Links page on my site and look under "Creativity."

"List all the HOMES or HOUSES you remember living in. Choose several from your completed list and write about HOW HOMES AND HOUSES INFLUENCE THE TYPE OF PERSON YOU BECOME."

1. 525 Greystone Road
2. My grandparent's house
3. The old farmhouse in Glencoe
4. An apartment in Stillwater.
5. A house in Stillwater
6. A different apartment in Stillwater
7. A trailer in the country.
8. An apartment in Perkins
9. A house in Danbury CT
10. A different house in Danbury CT
11. My in-laws house
12. The Midwest City house on Phinney Drive
13. The house on 41st street on the south side of OKC
14. The house I live in now.

No wonder I'm tired.

We were shaking ourselves out of 525 Greystone Road (my dad was anyway) and headed for Oklahoma for a variety of reasons when my Mom's mother passed away. Her father had depended on her for everything--cooking, bookkeeping, etc., etc. He went out to a job every day and she ran the house. We couldn't just leave him, he didn't want to come with us, but we had already sold good old 525, so we moved in with him for a year.

From Greystone Road came my first true friends. I kept in touch with one of the girls until I was a freshman in college. And there came that first taste of "socialization" that adults love to spout on about in connection with homeschooling--rivalries, S.E. being "mad" at one of us all the time, and then she had to go to bed earlier than anyone so we got together after she was gone and compared notes. We wandered through the woods in back of the houses. I'm grateful I lived in a time when it was safe to do that. Later I heard it was the place for drug deals to go down, and since then the trees have been cut down for houses. We climbed trees, waded in the stream and ocassionally worked up the nerve to walk clear to the back of a farm on down the road and feed apples to the horses. We rode our bikes around the block and ocassionally snuck off to the "split level" division which was out of bounds and therefore always an area of curiousity. We imagined all kinds of people living down there, ready to snatch kids and boil their eyes. We went anyway.

The stay at my grandfather's was difficult. Changing schools was very tough. I kept my sites fixed on the house in Oklahoma with a pony. My father left in March to settled in and get a job; we followed in June when school was out. Meanwhile I read all about the Oklahoma Land Run and Little House on the Prairie. I knew that my grandfather was mad at us for leaving him. I wish I had been more compassionate, but I was just 10. I missed my grandmother very, very much and was ready to be out of her house without her in it.

I thought changing schools inside Pennsylvania was tough. Glencoe, OK set me back quite a bit. I talked funny, I dressed funny. Everyone knew who I was--we'd been talked about since we moved in. I know that now because we sat around and speculated about new people who'd moved in over later summers. Word gets around fast in a small town where everyone is practically related. Then I had to top all that off with being smart--schools in PA were a bit ahead of the rural one I was going to. My work was always singled out for examples of how it was done--especially when it came to writing--and I was too ignorant or prideful can't decide which--to make myself do poorly so I could stop being the center of ridicule and/or other attention. I don't think I ever came into my own in Glencoe. I started to toward the end of my high school years. I remember it dawning on me that if I wanted to wear green on Thursday (declared a no-no by the "in" crowd. They would find anything to make fun of people over!), I could do just that and let people say what they wanted to say, because in the end all that mattered was the fact that I liked green. That was a start.

My first apartment away from home came at the end of my first year of college. A young woman moved into Stillwater from Michigan to work part-time and share in a volunteer Bible education work. She was having difficulty making ends meet by herself, and I wanted to get into the same volunteer work, but the drive from my parents' house on a daily basis meant quite a bit of gasoline money. So I moved into her apartment. She wanted me there so badly she moved into the living room to sleep and let me have the one bedroom. We split a job as well--I worked as a research assistant for the Agronomy Department. Learned more about seeds there than I ever dreamed a person could know. When the grant money ended there, we threw papers for a month--HATED THAT--got different jobs, ran into two other girls who wanted to do the same thing we were doing, and so we all rented a four-bedroom house.

What a house! There I learned about lunatic landlords and counting costs FIRST. We hit the winter time, got the first power bill and nearly died. After that we only heated the rooms that had pipes in them, and kept warm at night using electric blankets. Mine caught on fire one night. That's another story.

Of course as life moves on things change. We left the house on Husband Street--without husbands I might add, and I moved in with one of the girls into a modern apartment that had CABLE! It was the first and only time I've had cable TV down to this day--it came with the rent. We lived in a two bedroom unit till my sister graduated and wanted to move in with us, then we moved to a three bedroom, but after about a year that was history and my sis and I moved into a trailer out in the country where we couldn't keep up with cutting the grass (no mower but a push one. No engine, mind you. The old fashioned push only with the blades that spin kind) and we left there after a year for more reasons than that.

From there I found my own place--by myself--in Perkins. How I wish now I had relished that alone time a little more. It was glorious without a roomie. Expensive. But closer to work, in the middle of my friends, and I could cook, clean OR NOT as I chose. I was too busy thinking I was miserable to enjoy it. I'd give my eyeteeth for it now. Eventually the roomie that I moved from the 4-bedroom place with joined me there, and we were together till I got married.

A year plus after we were married we made the leap across country following work. Landed in the the big blue duplex on Pahquioque. My oldest son was born there. When he was two we bought a house where we lived until the economy fell apart, and we were fortunate enough to sell it without losing our shirts. We headed back home to OK, stayed with my in-laws for 9 months while dh took tests to work at a post office somewhere in the state. After I found out we were expecting our second we started looking for a place of our own and settled on Phinney Drive. Our youngest was born there. Later it was sold and we moved to the south side of OKC. We hated it there. After a couple years we were back in Midwest City in the house we have now. No more babies, and no more moving.

I think I'll leave the shaping part for tomorrow. WAKE UP!