Home-52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History-Week 4

I was born and raised in the same home. The same home I so often described in my posts about cleaning out the family home. After so many years in the same home, I have a lot of memories, so I'll just focus on three.


When I was really little, our house had exposed hardwood floors. The living room connected to the hallway the bedrooms were off of. As little kids, we loved to slide on the hardwood floors. We would get a running start across the living room and then hit the floor and try to slide all the way down the hall to the end. If we did it just right, we'd stop just as we were hitting the closet door at the far end. It was so much fun! Then my parents went carpeted floors which put an end to our fun. Today when I walk into the house, I have a hard time imagining myself running across the living room and sliding down the hallway. I mean how did I keep my long legs and arms from hitting the walls? It's hard to believe but I was that small and it just wasn't a problem.

One of Dad’s traits was that he could make just about anything. We had a huge backyard, so Dad built us a sailing ship of sorts out of two giant wooden spools and completed it with a sail. He knocked some of the boards out of the center part of each spool to make too little rooms. Since the spools were sitting right next to each other, he built a little platform to connect them. It made for great place to hang out with our friends and we would even take our lunch out there to eat.

For the sails dad took a long metal pole, a long piece of wood for the boom, and a huge piece of netting cut in the shape of a sail. He even rigged up ropes and pulleys so we could run the sail up and down. It was great fun on summer afternoons.
One thing about Western Washington is that few homes, had air conditioning. Those rare hot summer afternoons could be brutal. Our house had a great natural solution to the problem: an underground basement. We didn't need air conditioning on a hot afternoon. We just headed for the basement where it was naturally very cool. Not having cable TV back in those days, our choices for television were very limited to the three major networks, PBS, and a local reruns station. Often on those hot afternoons Sesame Street was one of the few or only choices. For the most part that was just fine by us and the neighborhood kids because we had a cool place to hang out until ice cream truck came by.

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History by Amy Coffin is a series of weekly blogging prompts in 2011to encourage you to record memories and insights about your life.


© 2011, copyright Michelle Goodrum