Sunday, March 2

As I look back now, folks were doing a lot of moving around. I think that may be one of the reasons it was so important to me in my older life to become stable for my children and when I was younger it may have contributed to my restlessness and continued traveling. There are pros and cons to both situations, but I think it is more important to be as stable as possible.
From the time I was about 7 years old until I was 11 is the time I remember best in my childhood. The funny thing is that I only remembered negative aspects of that time until I worked the 12 Steps of a recovery program. I have really realized that was a great time in my life. Granted, there were some negative aspects, but overall life was pretty good.
I lived at 1805 Belle Terrace in Bakersfield California. Our phone number was 805-832-3299. The house was a old farm house, it was nice and we had about a quarter acre of land. You would walk into the front door and the house would be spotless. Straight ahead would be my grandmother’s recliner that she always had. The livingroom would veer to the left with a couch on each side of the room and a coffee table in the middle. One couch belonged to my Grandma Nicholson, my Grandma Clara’s mother. She had lived two house down and had watched me when we had lived in Lindsay. Grandma Nicky had taught me now to cut our paper dolls from newspaper and play “Button Button, who’s got the button”.
The large black and white TV sat at the far left on the center of the wall and it is where we watched shows like Bonanza and Gunsmoke. Directly to the right would be my grandmother’s room. It was a sunny room painted baby blue. Her furniture was white and everything would always be in it’s place. The floor’s were spotless and I recall that Grandmother only had to use a dust mop to get the dust out from under her bed. Today, in my house, with 5 children, I cannot imagine what it would be like to be able to keep my house as clean as my Grandmother kept hers. I strive for it every day, but it is just not possible.
You would have to walk around Grandmother’s chair a little to walk down the short hallway towards the kitchen. Off of the hallway were the restroom to the right and Grandma Nicky’s room to the left. Grandma Nicky always had a box of candy under her bed, and she would let me have a piece from time to time. My favorite was the almond roca. In the hallway ceiling was a large fan called a swamp fan. It sat on the roof and it is what cooled the house in the summer time. I small amount of water was used in a constant stream to keep the filters on all the sides damp and that is what cooled the house. There was swinging type of door before you walked into the kitchen that you could either close when you wanted to cooler primarily the front of the house or open to cool the kitchen as well.
The kitchen was huge! My Grandmother loved it, and she could truly worked magic in that kitchen. It was more than a kitchen of course. It was the gathering place for the family, it was the place we played penny ante poker, it was the room my Aunt Betty through the glass of buttermilk at the police in.
There was two more rooms in that house. Of f to the left was another bedroom and whoever happended to be there at the time stayed in that bedroom. Most of the time I did too, but if we had an extra grown up then I was designated to sleep on the couch. That didn’t seem to bother me at all. It was almost like having my own room.
Through the backdoor was a back porch which had been sealed in and in which my Poppa lived. To the right side was the washing machine, but to the left was Poppa’s room. Never in my life can I remember my Grandmother and Popa sleeping together nor any indication that they ever had sex.
I loved the floor in that room because Poppa had collected carpet scraps of every shape and color and had pieced them together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. It was great! The house had a large yard and two fruit trees in the back yard. An apricot tree and a plum tree. The apricot trees was easy to climb and I spent a lot of hours sitting in the tree.. There was also a large bar b que pit that looked like it was made to bar b que a whole steer in. We never used it, so I used it to play in and to keep my animals in if I had them.
In the far part of the back yard was an old shed and my Popa had a vegitable garden surrounding the shed. There were tomatoes, carrots, okara corn, green beand and ple beans, turnips, nad radishes, and eggplant among others. As I look back on that, I think that was a GREAT garden! What a great job they did on that and how much work must have went into it! I have attempted gardens here at my house but we don’t have a spot that suits it growing right, and it is SO expensive to grow your own veggies!

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