EY#13: Describe the House(s) You Grew Up In.

Somehow, it only seems fitting that the post I would write the day after where/when I was born would be the house I grew up in. While I actually grew up in two different houses, I'll focus on the one where I lived for 14 of the 18 years.  Not to say that the farm in Watertown, Wisconsin isn't worth mentioning, because it is.  I ADORED the four years I lived there, it just seems that that needs to be a different kind of post....

I grew up in a family home at 450 South 4th Street in Aurora, Illinois.  I say "family home" in a different sense than you might think, especially since it consisted of two flats.  The first floor flat had 3 bedrooms (after my dad remodeled it) and the upstairs flat had 2 bedrooms.  I lived on the first floor from birth to eight years and then on the upstairs from twelve to eighteen years. (Wisconsin was the four years in between!)

Our house had a rich family heritage.  You see, before the depression my great-grandfather Haag was a fairly wealthy man who built fabulous houses!  The 4th Street house was one he built about three blocks from his home as a wedding present for my grandmother Pearl (Haag) Hill.  The house was fabulous! Both flats had a full kitchen, formal dining room, living room and front entry.  All of the woodwork and flooring was hard oak! Beautiful and durable.  The most distinctive feature of wood-work were the colonnades! Made of oak, they were room dividers; an arched center, "windows" on each side, columns and beautiful scrolled designs.  They provided a great place for a little girl to play restaurant where the order would be put into the "window" from one side and picked up and delivered to whichever poor adult or sibling she could badger into being the customer!

I remember when I was very small, the house was a dark beige color with brown trim. Why do I remember?  Because I remember coming home from my grandma's house one stormy night and seeing my house in the dark and being PETRIFIED!  Although I don't believe I'd ever seen a horror film, that's what it looked like, and I couldn't believe it was MY HOME!  I didn't want to go in and I cried and cried!  I wonder if that had anything to do with the house being painted gray with white trim later????

The first floor originally had a large screened-in back porch.  This was turned into a third bedroom for my brothers about the time my parents decided it was time for me to move out of their bedroom!  The first floor also had a HUGE front porch, great for playing games that I couldn't win with my brother Al!  The upstairs flat also had a large front porch that was screened in and perfect for sleeping on a hot, humid summer night!

The top of the house had a HUGE walk-up attic that ran the full length of the house.  It was the kind of attic you see in old movies with all kinds of marvelous old things to discover.  Equally as fabulous was the basement.  Again, it ran the full length of the house and provided ample space for chest freezers, washer, dryer, playhouse for me and wrestling mats for my brothers.  But the GREATEST part of the basement was the train room!!!  My brothers had the most fabulous train set, with steam engines that actually shot steam and whistled!  To create a home for the train set, my dad knocked out a basement wall that went to the foundation of the boys' new bedroom and built a great big plywood train table that went all the way around the room. You had to crawl under the table to get to the center where the controls were.  Of course, I was never allowed to TOUCH the controls, but I could stay there forever and watch my brothers play with their train set because it wasn't just a train... it was a whole miniature community!

The old house went through a lot of changes through the years to meet the family's changing needs.  Originally we had a nice big fenced in backyard, with a big maple (?) tree that was home to Skippy.  Skippy was our squirrel.  Why Skippy? Because he LOVED it when we would take Skippy Peanut Butter sandwiches out to him and leave them in the tree for him to eat!  Eventually, the backyard gave way to a 3-car garage and a triple-wide driveway, but my greatest memory of the backyard was SO insulting!  

You see, our house sat right next to a very long alley that connected 4th and 5th streets.  Since our house faced 4th, it was the first house served by the alley.  I remember coming home from school for lunch one day in the first grade, so proud that I was learning to read.  I took our dog, Boots out to go potty and noticed a sign on the telephone next to our driveway and thought, "I bet I can read that sign!"  So I did.  Surrounding the silhouette of a running boy, the sign said: "SLOW CHILDREN"  I was horrified; humiliated! Who had put that sign there and what right did they have to call us slow?!?!?!  My first awareness of the injustices of the world and I couldn't be consoled...that sign haunted me all through my teen years! Stupid sign!  It's probably STILL there torturing other children... "Signs, signs, everywhere signs. Blockin' up the scenery, wastin' my time.   Do this. Don't do that. Can't you read the sign???"