I have moved to different places to live so many times, I’ve lost count. I would need a spreadsheet to categorize how many places I have lived, when, and likely, there will be a few more before I leave the planet.
As I have gotten older, and wanted to see if places I have lived still look the same, I have gone into “Google Maps” and located the place my parents were living when I was born. We drove by this old house back in the fall of 2020, so that I could see if it was still there. It was. It was built just after WWII ended, and was a “GI” house – made in the tradition of using cinder-blocks on a slab, then putting the siding up – probably some insulation, and coated paper underneath… I remember it being light color. Likely, over the years, people have updated it and so it looks a bit different from what I remember.
In my earliest memory, from when we lived in this house, it was of my bedroom, and of the living room-dining room and kitchen. I sort of remember my parents’ room. I remember it had two bedrooms, and small-ish. Of course to little me, it was a lot larger than this picture shows, which is the actual size of the house.
This is the back yard. Another one of my earliest memories was going out back, to play in the water hose, which I did in the summer because it was West Texas and it was hot as hell. There was a frog, probably attracted to the water, and I guess I didn’t see it, but I stepped on it – squished it – and it bled – and I got very upset and started screaming and crying.
Another memory is of me being with my Dad, around his workshop – the building to the left in the photo above – he always gave me blocks of wood to play with, probably so I would not get in his way or get hurt. There were lots of loud noises coming from his wood working tools in the workshop. He was a maker.
I am pretty sure I was a “mostly happy” kid until I we moved and I left my safety net – my grandparents
I remember spending a lot of time parked at my grandparents’ house. I loved being with my grandmother. She taught me how to do a lot of things like cooking, baking, sewing, and playing cards and other games. She was from Kentucky, and carried many traditions from her home state such as recipes and her idea of decorum and etiquette. She had been to “finishing school” after high school graduation, which was in Boston. Her dad was a merchant of “fine goods”. He passed away when my Mom was a little kid.
However, my great-grandmother, remarkably, I do remember, as she came to live with my grandparents, and did until she passed away, when I was almost two. She was kind to me, and seemed just very fragile and old, which actually, she wasn’t that old – but maybe since she had health issues, it just seemed that way. I was just turning two years old when she died. It’s amazing to me that I have memories of that time.
I remember sitting with her outside in my grandparents’ back yard, swinging in a hammock. That was one of my favorite things to do at my grandparents’ house when I was small. Where they lived in west Texas, it was pretty dry and
Back at our house, I usually played by myself. I was an only child, so if we didn’t have one of my Mom’s friends with their kids at our house, it was me, myself and I. I remember that I had an “imaginary friend” that came into my life pretty early – maybe age three or four. Her name was Minnie. Later, another one came into Minnie’s life – Mannie. Minnie and Mannie. They were always up to something that got ME into trouble. Only children with imaginations like mine generally need imaginary friends to share the blame for mischief!
I also remember deciding one day that I was going to school. I got my crayons, and coloring book, and got myself ready to walk out the front door. My Mom said, “Where are YOU going?” I said , “to school”. She said, “NO YOU ARE NOT!”, and seemed somehow offended. That surprised and upset me. Each day, I saw kids that looked about my age, walking by on the way to school. We lived just a short distance away. In my mind, I must have thought that all it took was for me to get my clothes on, grab my crayons and coloring book, and go out the door to join them.
So, because Mom was upset and I was crying by then, she got sort of shouty and we got into sort of an argumentative exchange whereby at the end of it I got a whack on the behind and got sent to my room. I look back on that and think, “why was my mom angered by me doing that?” Maybe she thought I was slipping out the door. Maybe it scared her somehow. Maybe she felt a loss of control. Who knows?
When my kids did things like this, normally, I had to hold in my giggles. I think I would have burst out laughing and thought it was really funny and cute, if one of my kids did that – but with my Mom, you could never predict how she would react. Mom was kind of unpredictable, and kind of scary at times.
It was, for me a bit confusing, living with her, not knowing if she would be nice, or mean – and not knowing what I was doing to cause her to be one way or the other. I am still not too sure, looking back, if she felt like I was cramping her style. She was very social, and was working part-time – and likely, me being there at home with her was holding her back or something. She eventually enrolled me in “Miss Harvey’s” which was a pre-school-kindergarten kind of class. I think that I was four by then.
I remember just ahead of one of my birthday parties, Mom was scurrying around trying to get ready to have people over, including some of the kids that were her friends’ kids that got invited – kids I played with occasionally. I was so excited about the party that I barfed, right in the middle of the kitchen floor! Well, Mom got mad. She spanked me and sent me to my room to wait until the party started. I remember feeling confused, and crying a lot, and my face got all stingy.
I remember that when my grandmother got there, she came in my room and hugged me, and took me in the bathroom and put a cold wet washcloth on my face. To this day whenever I need to “de-puff” my eyes, or face, or make a headache feel better, I put a cold wet washcloth on it – and remember my grandmother. She always had some way of making things okay.
We moved out of that house to another house just before I started first grade. We next lived in my grandparents house, because they decided to move back to New Mexico. That was the beginning of my next chapter. I loved living at my grandparents house because it had all these cool places to play and great trees to climb. That one, shown below, was at the time, to me, a really big house. It probably isn’t that large, but it had a great yard and lots of space in the house to play and get into trouble!
Moving to the big city almost two days drive away was quite the change. My Mom had to adjust to a new set of friends. She also had to figure out how to get around and navigate the city. My Dad worked downtown, and it took him almost an hour to get from our house to his work. It was definitely different from the small town in west Texas where I was born and we had been living since then. My Mom and Dad met there and got married there. My Mom was actually born there, which was interesting. My grandparents moved in and out of that town several times in their lives. Clearly, they loved it and felt it was their anchor in Texas.
I think about change and how as we move through life, every day has small changes, and then there are some big changes that happen, some unexpectedly.
