This is my first blogger carnival. Here goes!
My childhood home was a tri level. It was absolutely beautiful. Allow me to give you a tour, as no memories come floating back except for basically the lay out of the house. My childhood was spent mostly hiding under a bed, waiting for da to go to work. It's easier to give a tour and just float back with the tour, adding in a few things here or there that fit.
When you pull into our driveway you can see my mum is a gardener. The garage has a basketball goal hung up as well as the numbers 4919 in black metal. Stepping out of your car and looking straight out you see a huge oak tree. Next to the tree is my grandmother's old bird bath and around that is a beautiful array of Lilly of the Valley. Connected to that round garden is a long garden that is not that old. Mum put it in when I was starting high school. It has Azalea Bushes and other sorts of bushes that I'm sure mum's told me about, but I've forgotten. Again attached to that is the HUGE garden below the window. It has everything, including my wild flowers that I planted when I was 4. I am so proud of those flowers and remember very well the day that mum and I spread them around the garden. They all started out at the top right hand side, but soon we learned that those seeds spread quickly. We have a huge front porch that the kittens used to play on. On the right of the front porch is the door to the garage and sitting against it is a deer pelvic bone that a friend of ours found when he was looking through a newly dug up area. We call it a skull, and it probably still sits there.
Next to the garage door is yet another garden. It has lots of Grape Hyacinths in it. At the end of the garden is the Azalea bush that we keep killing with the basketball goal. I do suck at H.O.R.S.E.
When you walk in the front door you come into a living room. To your right was a coat closet and to your left was the room. Just past the closet was the steps going downwards and just beyond that, the steps up. There is horrible brown carpet in the walk-in room. Along the left wall is the hook for the coats. It has our last name engraved in it and 5 hooks. This is where we hang the stockings at Christmas. Next to that is a brown couch that is straight out of the 70's. Behind that is the big picture window. That window is where our cats, Bobbie and Josh, sit all the time, peering out over the garden, waiting for the possums to come out and play. On the far wall is the beautiful wood bookcases with the turn table/stereo combo in the middle on a plank of wood. All over the bookcases you see family pictures. Pictures of all my uncles and aunts when they were young and even pictures of my grandfather, whom I've never met. Next to the bookshelf is the record holder. Yes, my mum had loads of records.
Through the walk in room we go into the kitchen with a built in area for a dining table. Mum picked out beautiful white oak cabinets that have been smoke damaged. We always joke about that story, now anyways. When I was about 4 or 5, my aunt turned on the oven after we had been playing a rousing game of “hide the barbies”. We left some in the oven apparently, and had us a nice little Bar-Bie-Q. Smoke billowed throughout the house, but it's made for quite an embarrassing story as I'm getting older. There is a rather large amount of counter space in the kitchen and just beyond the island is our dining table. It has 5 chairs, and came from my Grandma Gaha. It's very old and falling apart, but it's been at our house since she died, I was 6 when that happen.
Leaving the walk in area, we'll head downstairs first. It's easier to describe downstairs and we have loads of memories hanging out down there.
First things first, bathroom is the first door on the right. Downstairs used to be my mum and da's bedroom when I was little. It had their water bed in it and their old timey furniture. Then, after my oldest brother moved out for college it became our living room. It has a nice tile floor and a hunter green couch. We had a nice 26 in TV in there and a pretty awesome entertainment center. On the other half of the room there is still some brown shag carpet. I must say my parents didn't update much from the 70's when they moved in. There is a bar, with no alcohol, and a computer on that side. Underneath the bar is another great childhood memory. On the underside of the nice black wood was fingernail polish. I had a great obsession with polish when I was a young child. I painted it bright red from the stash of my mum's polish. Mum wanted to sell me after that, but my da convinced her otherwise.
Going back upstairs we traipse through the brown carpet living room. Up 7 steps to the hall of rooms. Those 7 steps were GREAT of sliding down on cushions when I was a kid. And even after I slammed into the wall a few times, I still enjoyed it when my brothers pushed me “mega fast!”.
Standing on the 7th step you are looking at 5 doors. The first door on the right is the bathroom and shower. It's really big but all the paint is peeling cause my brothers must shower in pure hot water, and there is no vents except the one that always falls off.
The second door is a linen closet. It mostly holds sheets for our beds.
The third door, which is right opposite of the steps, used to be the room I shared with my brother. LOADS of great memories come outta that room, memories that are too personal to share and some that you would have to be a member of our family to get. The 2-3 years my brother, Fox, and I Spent in one room helped us bond in a way no one else could. Later, the room changed ownership to just Fox, and eventually my parents moved back up there, once my oldest brother, Thunder, was out.
The fourth door from the right, second from the left, started out as Fox and Thunder's room, but when I was born, Fox moved into the other room and Thunder got that room all to himself. Thunder's passion in life is space, always has been. So my mum painted his room black and put up a HUGE mural of Saturn on his back wall. And across the other walls she painted star constellations. They glowed in the dark too! It was the most awesome room I've ever been in. Once Thunder went away to college, the room became Fox's. He hated the black, so he painted over it in dark green. Hideous. Once Fox went off to college, I got that room, FINALLY. I wasn't allowed to paint it though. This room gave us such great memories. The old bunk beds were in here, and I remember once having the kittens in there only to find one peed on Fox's pillow. I never told him, until he laid in it. Oh his face was hilarious!
The final door from the right, first on the left, was my room. It is the smallest, but that's okay. There isn't much to my room, it's white, with wall paper that I've spent 10 years peeling off. My bed is plain... I'm a huge fan of white.
So back out the door, and down the steps. Back through the kitchen you see the back door. It's decorated with all my kindergarten projects. My favourite being the kite with the wiggly eyeballs all over it. Stepping out back, be careful. There is a big black lab that is waiting to pounce on you! This back yard is most of my childhood memories.
All throughout my life there was a high way behind my house, HWY 22 to be exact. The most exciting moments of my life were involving cars and that highway. When I was 7, a port-a-potty truck crashed through our fence, scattering feces every where. When I was 8 an older type car crashed through, leaving a younger boy into the house cursing his brains out and stating “My father is going to f***ing kill me!”. When I was 9 another car crashed through the fence and almost took out the house.
Growing up, my childhood wasn't littered with many great stories. The only great story that's worth mentioning is that I had a best friend way back then. We used to watch New York Undercover every thursday night and had a “half way” point between out houses (though it was 12 houses from mine and only 4 from hers... she swears it's half way between the houses). Every night, when we were done playing, we go to our half way point and do our secret hand thing... “You can't be the hippest cop in NY if you don't know the code.. ba damn” and we'd hit knuckles.
We moved from the house of my childhood when I turned 18 and went off to college. We've lived in 2 other places since then, and the house now isn't nearly as nice as that one was. I can't wait until I'm able to buy a house, because I fully plan to go make an offer on that house and hopefully get back the house I grew up in.
This entry doesn't have many memories, because honestly I don't have many that are all that great. We never sat around and sang songs, we never read the Bible together, we never did much. We all had our own things, but the one thing that always makes me smile when I think of that house is the fact that we were a family there. Now we all live elsewhere, my parents are divorced, Fox is battling kidney disease and trying to deal with his GF who's parents died in the Comair crash of almost a year ago, Thunder now owns his own house and is trying to fix that up so that some day he can start a family of his own there. Mum is remarried and I live in this house with her and her husband, and da moved to a completely different state and is remarried for the 2nd time after his divorce. Everything has changed, but those times spent in that house, even the times under the bed hiding, shaped me into who I am today and shape my dos and don'ts for my future children.
I hope you enjoyed my tour. It's more a tour, but I hope it fits into the carnival... we'll see I suppose.
