It was many years that I last saw the house where I lived until I was twelve. In my memory, it was a big house with a big backyard. I was married with children when I saw my house next. Oh my! How very tiny!
The exterior of the house wasn't much different from when we moved. Most changes were in the landscape. The lilac bush that stood near the street on the left side of the yard was gone.
The tree near the front of the house to the left of the walkway was gone as well. I wasn't surprised as it was struck by lightning about a month before we moved. A portion of the tree was split from the tree so I expect that the tree didn't survive the next winter.
The tree on the right side of the walkway was still there. My father and I visited his uncle's farm one day and came home with a sapling. It was the first tree in our yard. When we moved, the trunk of that tree wasn't much more than 5 inches in diameter. How it had grown!
The next time that I saw the house was 10 years later. The exterior was quite different. The fake stone façade was removed and new windows installed. The poor little house looked quite plain.
When my sister and I visited the house in 1991, we did not see if the residents were at home. When we visited the house in 2001, she knocked on the door. The son of the current owner was home and invited us in to see the house.
We learned that his parents bought the house from our parents. They had not enlarged it or appreciably remodeled it other than adding a deck behind the house. The huge old furnace in the basement had been replaced by a much smaller, modern one. I remember that it seemed to take up a large portion of the basement on one side of the staircase. As my sister and I walked through the house, we couldn't image how 8 people fit in that house.
About a year ago, I saw the house again. I don't know if the people who owned it in 2001 were the current owners, but whoever owned the house had made a number of improvements to the exterior and the landscaping. I am really sorry that the fake stone façade was removed. But the red door and the shutters on the windows really help make the little cute again.
I am hoping that the interior was updated too.
Most of the houses on our side of the street looked like this house. We called them Monopoly houses because they were shaped just like the green houses in a Monopoly game. They were built after World War II to support the baby boom. When my parents bought this house, it had two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, a kitchen, a basement and an attic.
The front door opens to the living room, which is on the right of the photo. The window on the left side of the door is in the master bedroom. The second bedroom is behind it. Behind the living room is a staircase to the attic. The kitchen is on the other side of staircase. Below this staircase is one to the basement and is accessed from the kitchen. The bathroom is located between the rear bedroom and the kitchen.
As our family grew in size, my father finished half of the basement into a recreation room, sometimes called a rumpus room. One year, my grandfather came from California to help my dad turn the attic into another bedroom with storage space.
That house holds a lot of fond memories.
I was talking the other day to a woman at my gym who was concerned about moving and the impact on her teenage son. She was worried that he would have trouble meeting friends because her son is very shy. I told her that I faced a similar situation when my husband took a job in the San Francisco area, but I knew that my son would make friends based on my own experience.
As a student, I went to two elementary schools, two junior high (middle) schools, two high schools and two universities. At each change, I met new friends from the members of my class. And as I predicted, my son found friends at his new school and has maintained that connection beyond his high school graduation.
You may think that I attended all of these schools because my family moved a lot. You would then be incorrect. I was a part of the baby boom that occurred after World War II. The number of children that were born in the years following the war strained the public school system. Communities were faced with having to build more schools to accommodate the dramatic increase in children of school age.
I started kindergarten at Adair Avenue Elementary School. I don't have much recollection of my time at the school. I remember being in kindergarten and sitting on the floor while the teacher read us a story. I also remember coloring pussy willows with colored chalk and having to have a nap on a mat in a darkened room. First grade also left me with few memories.
I fell off the schoolbus regularly when we arrived at the school to the point that I had bandages on my knees on a regular basis and had scars on my knees for many years later. As it turns out I needed glasses. By first grade, we were starting to read. I had learned to read before I was in kindergarten because my mother was a former school teacher. But this was the first time that I was asked to read from the blackboard. So that year I ended up with eye glasses.
My brother had started kindergarten that year but was at New Hope School. This school had been a one-room school in what was a rural part of the county. It was scheduled to be demolished but was temporarily saved by the urgent need of a place to house kindergarten students. Adair Avenue kindergarten was full.
The next year, I was to begin my second grade. My 1st grade brother and kindergarten brother all started at Noble Avenue Elementary School. The construction on the school was not completed until after the school year began. The focus was on completing the classrooms and then finishing the remaining facilities within the building.
I was in the morning kindergarten class so was home by lunch time, but I had lunch in the school cafeteria when I was in 1st grade. In the early months of second grade, we had to bring our lunch and we ate lunch in our classroom. Before I ended my time in second grade, we had a cafeteria. It was at Noble Avenue School that I first experienced the multi-purpose room.
Noble Avenue School was my home from second through sixth grade. However, as I was about to enter junior high school, the school district needed to build another junior high school. I ended up at the new school rather than the school that I had expected to attend. This time most of my class from Noble Avenue were in the same school with me but I was placed into a special program at the school. The students in this program were kept separated from the other new junior high students. There were 72 of us divided into two homerooms. Since we came from several elementary schools, I found myself in a homeroom with about a quarter of the students I already knew.
My parents then moved us to California. I attended O A Peters Intermediate School. I made some friends, some of whom ended up at the same high school with me. The end of that year, my parents bought a house that was in the same school district but would place me in another high school, This was the school from which I graduated.
During my time in high school, the district was building a 5th high school and had created a contest to name the 5th school. A few years after I graduated from high school, the district lines were redrawn so that my younger siblings ended up at another high school than the one from which I graduated.
Years later, many of the schools were closed because there were not enough students. But the one thing that I learned from my years as a student is that you will meet friends.
