Home Sweet Home

Every once in a while, I will use a realtor website to see what's for sale in the zip code that I grew up in. I've found houses that childhood friends lived in and it's been fun to see what the insides of the houses look like now. I've kept hoping that eventually, my own childhood home would be put on the market. This week, I struck gold! And I was excited to see that someone has loved the house and updated it.
 
What a treat to see the inside of the house that I called home from the age of one month till I moved out during college. My parents sold the house 25 years ago, so it's been a long time. The outside looks the same, minus the shrubbery and flowers we had all around the house. I can still picture the pansies and violets that came up every year around the front steps.

See that giant pin oak tree? I may or may not have skimmed it with the riding lawnmower when I was about 11 years old. And somehow, it survived!  My parents always called that window on the left, 'the picture window.' I don't recall every hearing that term since.

This is a view of the 'eat-in kitchen.' The only thing that is the same are the cabinets (the scalloped edges give away the 1960's origin). We had a rectangular formica table and my seat was the one in front of the window to the right. I remember making cookies and pies with my mom at that counter. I'd be on the other side of it, on my knees on a chair. Instead of that microwave cart, we had this enormous cement planter that was filled with sand and my mom had plastic flowers in it. How weird is that? Especially considering the glass door cabinet above it held her fine glassware and her wedding cake topper.

 

This was my bedroom. The last time I slept in it was 1984, when the walls were yellow and the wood floors were bare. The window on the left was over the driveway, which was quite handy for me to see who was coming and going. My desk was under the other window. I never sat at it; just kept my junk in its drawers.

This is the basement rec room. When we lived there, it was just gray cinder block walls and a cement floor. When I was older, we had a ping pong table down there. However, I spent many summers as a child, playing in that room with my brother and my best friend. We didn't have a ton of toys down there (I really only remember a small table with two chairs and a large chalkboard). We used our imaginations to play school, house, grocery store, and hotel. You might wonder how one plays 'hotel.' I was a bit obsessed with customer surveys back then, so that was the major part of the game. Me writing surveys asking for ratings on different aspects of their stay and making my brother and my friend fill them out. I know, I was a strange one.

 

Thanks for taking this trip down memory lane with me.