Anatomy of a Childhood Home

I had a small shock administered to my system as I took a spontaneous jaunt past my childhood home this afternoon.  You see, this is my childhood home as we left it when my family moved out in 2001:

This is how we found it today:

Bushes obliterated, Christmas lights hanging in June, grass coming up through the driveway, front porch swing replaced with piles of unused furniture...

... backyard toys in the front of the house, moldy siding, Mom's roses hacked out of the trellis, trees that seem to be growing out of the living room walls...

I fainted and swooned and made the appropriate amount of inappropriate Facebook comments about it shortly after.  Then I remembered that the new owners have a growing brood of three or four offspring, much like the four children of our own family who had the time of our lives growing up on that same lot.

I wondered if we had also left the yard in such disarray as we ran amok for the better part of the 70's and 80's.  Did we always have the time and resources to keep up with power-washing the siding and repairing every peel and splinter?  I decided to dig up some pictures and reanalyze the anatomy of my childhood home from the bones up!

This was the family home in its original form:

That's Tammy's hind and tail you see, my older sister screaming (right) and myself acting extra concerned.

A cinder block bungalow, painted yellow and insulated with old newspapers.  We didn't get around to pouring a sidewalk yet, so we walked on a row of press board sheets, laid single file, to get from the porch to the often muddy driveway.  This system proved good enough for a decade or so.  The boards would start to warp throughout the years, which added an extra ounce of fun to our childhood. Often on a dare and always with thrill, we'd take turns lifting up the boards one-by-one to see if anything good had crawled beneath.  It was usually just ants, worms and roly-polys to be found. But, on a special day, we might discover a crayfish hole.  On an even more special day, we might find a crayfish peeking out of its hole and snapping at us with one claw. Extra fun accompanied by extra squeals!

We had an above-the-ground green Kmart pool installed in the side yard (later moved to the back.)  It didn't matter that our house's paint had started to peel or that the phone line hung low.  This is where we all learned to swim!  My older sister, with obvious glee. Me, on the ladder, waiting to "get used to" the water temperature.  We all shared my yellow doggie bathing suit throughout the years as well as my sister's red one, and we all can now stave off drowning for an hour or two if need be.

I can't say much about the interior decor of our home in the 70's, because then I would also be commenting on the interior decor of your home in the 70's.  I'll let this one photo of baby me and older sis riding off into the sunset of our shared bedroom speak volumes.  I can tell you this, however.  It can be a dangerous thing to lazily roll over in bed and accidentally smack a wood-paneled wall in the middle of the night.  I can vividly remember waking up, on several occasions, with wood splinters underneath my fingernails and only having to venture one guess as to how they got there.  Not to mention, how the pattern of the wallpaper and linoleum flooring offered little comfort to any flu-sufferer stuck in bed. Already dizzy with fever from the virus, the dots and checkers would just spin and twirl until one was sure they'd somehow entered Lewis Carroll's wormhole.

As the 70's neared its close, this kid entered the house---apparently making it much too crowded.  Thus entering the family home into Phase II of its incarnation. That's my younger sister rolling around in her lead-based walker in the middle of an active construction zone. 

My dad designed an addition to be slapped onto the left side of the house.  It included a downstairs family room and dining room, and a new master bed/bath/closet upstairs.  The neighbors all pitched in with the build and, as far as I could tell, they were paid in McDonald's.  I remember climbing the staircase with my mom one evening to check on their progress only to find my dad and all the neighborhood teens sitting atop piles of two-by-fours and munching on as many quarter-pounders as they could stomach. I was incredulous!  We were only allowed McDonald's on Fridays!  Maybe if I could learn to build a house one day I too would be rewarded with fast food in the middle of the week.

Months of blood, sweat, toil and burger grease eventually gave way to this:

Black and white and red on the chimney.  The kids occupied the original right side of the house, still bungalow in style with the interior unchanged. And, the grown-ups took over the left side, where they could actually stand fully erect while digging through their closet.  Yes, as cute of an idea as a bungalow seems, let me present this warning: As I touch the top of my skull with the palms of my hands, I can still feel the lumps left behind from years of knocking my head into the sloping ceiling of my childhood room.  Permanent damage from the innocent notion that I could safely retrieve a clean pair of socks from the dresser drawer and emerge unharmed.  Consider yourself warned!

Well the house looked this way for the rest of my childhood.  The wood paneling doubled in quantity thanks to the doubling in square footage of the house itself.  Years of backyard fun was had as recorded for prosperity in an earlier post.  But, what about the issue of curb appeal that inspired this post to begin with?

With the arrival of my little bro in 1980, came the quadrupling of toys and noise spilling out of our yards, front and back.  I found evidence in this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

God bless the neighbors for still answering their doors when we rang!

We may have always had a project going on...

Maybe the dad who lived there then was a bit handier than the one who lives there now.  Maybe people didn't like our taste in style.  Maybe our dog yapped out back all night and the drivers passing by in the 80's were as appalled by the big wheels and bicycles strewn in the driveway as I was today.

Whether the bones of a house are strengthened throughout the years or left to rot, it will always be the structure the child remembers as "home".  I guess Christmas lights in summertime, furniture on the porch or mold on the siding has no effect on this.  Be it ever so humble... this is where every child's memories will be made, pages added to their story and fodder found for their future blogs.