From "What If" writing exercises: List in detail all the places you have lived - concrete grouping in time and place. (There were a lot more suggestions, including starting a whole notebook on this topic - so I will continue the theme in other posts).
In honor of my cousin's birthday and my childhood friend.
From the age of two to sixteen we lived “in the country”. I figured it meant dirt roads and far away neighbors - two things I resented. Our street, 110th Street North named for function only (those Swedes), was a wide well-maintained gravel road that stretched about a mile between two paved county roads with houses set off the main road by long private driveways and hidden by disorganized patches of woods. Our private drive was long and straight - connected three houses - with ours sitting in the middle, maybe 200 yards in. My father had built this house with his brother, on a parcel of his parent’s land so that now he, one brother, two sisters and his mother all lived within a a mile radius - which was extremely close in country living. Just ore’ the field.
I never considered it true country because that was reserved for large farms with cattle or horses and grain bins. Town was a ten minute drive, and most people who chose to live out here didn’t do it for farming reasons, but rather to have the luxury of space, nature, big houses, and hobby horses. Not that we had any of that.
Our two story house had gold paint and brown trim. I guess that color was acceptable in the 70s and 80s. There was a simple front porch with a wide living room window to the left of the front door and another wide window further from the right of the front door that looked onto the kitchen table. The front had three second floor windows, and to the right a double door garage with a basketball hoop set up a half-foot short of regulation height. A cement pad the width of the garage and the same length long served as parking space and basketball court, but the rest of the drive was gravel.
Our kitchen had orange tile and dark brown cupboards, a wide front closet and a food pantry. It was small and long. The kitchen table looked out the front of our house, then kitchen sink looked out the back of house. A door in the middle opened into the garage and used as our back door, and an entryway opposite the back door opened up into the dining room. The dining table looked out a sliding glass door into the empty space where a deck was never built, into our sloping backyard. The part nearest the house sloped quickly away and was terraced and retained by a rock wall my mother had worked on one summer. Our backyard view was over our own land, a field, and a depression of brush and odd trees.
Opposite the table was a door down into a walkout basement that was half underground. We huddled in the underground part during tornadoes. My older brothers moved their bedrooms down here in junior high school. The dining room fed into the living room and both were carpeted with a medium shaggy brown carpet. Gross when I think of it now, but it was home and comfort for me then. We had a couch, a sofa, a couple of end tables and an upright piano in that room. The living room was on on the north side of the house, and my father had purposely not put a single window on the north side of the house because of Minnesota’s cold winters and ferocious wind chill. (At this point, my dad might say - do your remember the winter the pipes froze and burst?)
When you walked in our front door (which we rarely did, because we always came through the garage) you were met immediately with a staircase leading upstairs, lined with beige wall paper striped and floral and covered with horrid family and individual family photos. From the entrance you could go up, left into the living room, or right through a jagged hallway that had closet tucked in one corner and a half bath tucked in another, and ended in the dining room and the kitchen entrance. So effectively, this hallway united the house into a circle that one could run through when being chased…
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