My First House

I am foregoing the topic for today, which is honeymoon houses. I didn't own a house until I was in my late thirties and it certainly wasn't a honeymoon house. My daughter and I moved there when she was 17.

We had been living in an apartment building on the 4th floor and I detested it. I wanted to have a place where I could have a garden and a dog...two things that were near and dear to my heart. So, in the spring of 1987, we started looking for a house.

We found the perfect one - a little cottage. Everything was on one floor and that meant I didn't have to climb the stairs four flights up to an apartment. Yes, there was an elevator, but more often than not, it was out of order and you risked getting stuck in it if you decided to use it. I even carried groceries up all four flights.

The house we found was beside a church and on the other side was a power transforming station. Both were small and we had that side of the street entirely to ourselves. There were no close neighbors and there were only two houses on the opposite side of the street. A single man lived in one and a single mother and daughter in the other. It was quiet and serene, except for Sunday morning when the street was lined with cars and we could hear the church services going on next door. I tell you, friends, that church rocked on Sunday morning.

The house had a small yard, but it was all that we needed...a place to have a flower garden and if we chose, a vegetable garden. I drove taxi fourteen hours a day at that time and so the vegetable garden never came to be, but we had flowers of all kinds in the front and side of the yard.

The kitchen was huge. The living and dining room were divided by an old fashioned archway and the bedrooms were quite small, but it provided all we needed. I loved that little house. It was while we lived there that we bought Snowball, an American Eskimo dog. He was supposed to be a spitz, but kept growing and before we knew it we had a medium sized dog. He was handsome and a little yappy but he was a lot of fun.

It seemed like life was going great until January 1988, when I became ill and was unable to work for over a month. We got behind on the mortgage and had to put a For Sale sign on the little cottage. It sold within 24 hours and we made a nice amount on it, which we used to put a down payment on another little house.

I don't have any photos of that house to show you, but it was a wartime cottage and so not very fancy, but it was home.

If you would like to join the I Remember When meme, please visit Speaking from the Heart. It's a lot of fun stepping back in time through our memories. ~Blessings, Mary~