A New House

The move to the white house was good for all of us in the long run. We girls got down to two in a room and Aboy had his own place. That cut down on bickering so Mom had less referree-ing to do. It was a little less crazy and that was good.

The yard was bigger, we had more kids our age to play with and we were still only a block from the store, a block from the church hill, and 3 blocks from school. It was 4 blocks to downtown and 5 to the library. 7 blocks to the river side park. 3 miles to the dad's folks farm and 4 blocks to the mom's folks apartment. It was our small world. It was good.

We didn't have any noisy neighbors, we WERE the noisy neighbors. Dad worked on race cars and motorcycles for himself and his friends after work. There was usually an extra vehicle or 3 around. One uncle/2nd cousin liked to enter the Demolishion Derby at the county fairs so there was a junker or two sometimes.

I had 3 motorcycles before I was 12 but only owned each till someone offered dad enough money to make him sell them. I hated that. I could only ride around the yard on them unless he trailered us out to state land so I guess it didn't seem like that big a deal to him. Having been told, "this one is yours" I tended to think I should be asked before he sold them, at least. One of them I really wanted to keep. It was a sweet little 125 cc Suzuki, medium blue original paint job, shiny chrome, good tires, started easy (kick start). I cried when he sold that one.

We had a corner lot with a church parking lot behind us and a kind of "strange but nice" couple next door to us. They had a million cats. One of their kittens was born with 5 legs, that was fascinating to us, we didn't understand about in-breeding then. They always let us play with their cats and they didn't holler at us for playing in the side yard. They were good neighbors.

This house also had a big front porch with a wide railing around it and 3 columns. You could dance on the railing, I know because we did! We could sit out there when it was raining and watch the storms lashing the trees.

There were several trees but only one really good climbing tree. We were only supposed to climb if an adult was home but, like most children, we figured what an adult didn't know couldn't hurt us.

So I was almost 8, that makes the others almost 7,6,5, and 2 when we started life in the big house.