Reminiscing

In the process of rehabbing my little house I have been thinking about all the memories I have acquired in the 40 years since I moved into it. I was 20 years old and had been married 4 weeks when we moved to this house. The house payment started out at a whopping $88.00 a month and I couldn’t imagine how we would ever manage it. We had just moved from a 10 X 40 foot trailer house near the college we were attending and the rent was half as much. After we married my husband Jim remained in school and I dropped out to work. We furnished our humble little abode with imagination and hand-me-down furniture. I made a coffee table out of a big base drum I got from my dad’s pawnshop and other than the deep resonant tone it immolated when you sat anything heavier than a magazine down it served the purpose quite well. I immediately fell in love with the little house and was thrilled to be able to decorate it as my own. I covered the kitchen walls in bright yellow contact paper adorned with daisies. I used the same paper to cover the roller shades on the windows. It was 1969 so we had a little of that hippie flair going on and daisies were my favorite flower. My babies were born the next year and when I became a single mother in 1977 I wouldn’t have made it if it hadn’t been for our little house. Child support was non-existent after two years but since the house was so affordable we got by. This little house has been a place of comfort and security to all of us. It is hard to believe I’ve lived in the house 40 years now. My memories are so embedded here that all I need to do is look around and I can see my little girls playing with Barbies in the hallway or hear them in their rooms negotiating deals over clothes. Although my daughters no longer live here and they each have homes of their own this little house is now and will always be home!