Time Marches On...

My first bedroom doorknob

The first thing I did in 2010 was visit my past. Literally. Friday morning was bright and crisp as our family loaded up and drove a couple of miles from my grandparents' home place (where we were staying) to visit the house where I lived from birth until 1988. Fearing that it may not be standing too much longer, Dad graciously arranged to have it opened for a last walk through before we left Illinois. While I've driven by it numerous times since our family moved down the road to Green Valley (and a much newer home), I hadn't entered its premises in at least two decades.

Armed with cameras, it was oddly exciting to show this place to husbands and children who had never seen the site of so many home movies and many, many childhood stories. I thought it would be sad, but instead it was fun to see how little had remarkably not changed over the years while memory after memory flooded back. While the exterior had deteriorated considerably, much of what I remembered inside was still in tact.

(Above) Showing Els my first bedroom. As a child it had a tiny gold/cream floral striped wall paper. Yellow continues to be my mom's favorite color.

(Below) We opened the cupboards in Hannah's bedroom to find the same shelf paper and a small scrap roll of wall paper which Mom hung on one wall (the others she painted mint green) for Hannie's nursery.

Probably the best 'preserved' room was Dad's old office which he paneled in 1972 with reclaimed wood from an old barn. Those are feed sacks on the ceiling. Even the carpeting was the same! (As Nathan says, "Shag never dies.") In spite of how 'vintage?' this room was, this was were we kept our very progressive Apple II Plus, purchased in 1981. We were bemoaning how different our financial situation might be had Mom and Dad not invested the same amount of money in Apple itself!

Here we are in our living room. That wood stove changed the way we experienced cold winters in a house that seemed to have more holes than a screen door. We also fed it loads and loads and loads of firewood which we stacked in piles on the corn crib slab in the back yard.

I requested this repose of a similar photo we took the day after Hannah's birth in January 1984. While waiting for the school bus, we wrote her birthday in the snow and Dad took a photo of us by it. Funny how the view of this side of the driveway hasn't changed a bit!

Our home wasn't fancy, but my parents worked hard to make it as nice as they could and keep it tidy. It was the site of so many nice memories from searching for kittens in the haymow, to sledding in the pasture, to making up adventures down in the peat ditch. Looking out the laundry room window, I remembered mom's clothesline and how we would drape sheets anchored with old bricks to make tents. In the kitchen I remembered the unexpected Easter egg hunt that revealed not Easter eggs but long-desired Cabbage Patch dolls (I found mine sitting on top of the wastebasket in the tall cupboard by the fridge). In the front bedroom upstairs, I remembered laying on the floor and dropping missles (anything small from legos to scraps of paper) through the register vents to the living room below). While recalling these events from several hundred miles away, it seems like a long, long, time ago -- but while standing in the place where those memories took place, it seemed like just yesterday. I think that's why it will be sad when the house is really gone for good.

Unfortunately, the house was FREEZING so the little girls weren't good for long and our stay seemed too brief to capture all the photos I wanted, but there would probably never be enough time to revisit all the nooks and crannies of the place that's felt the most like HOME.