As if it wasn’t nostalgic enough finding an old ma…
As if it wasn’t nostalgic enough finding an old mall I vaguely remembered from my childhood wasn’t enough, I was googling the Clear Lake City area where I spent the years 1975-1981 (second through sixth grades) when I stumbled upon this ad. This, of course, is the house we lived in at the time, and it happens to be for sale.
This opens up an ocean of memories. This is the house where I would come home after school and realize I’d forgotten my keys as I stood locked outside listening to the phone ring inside. The window on the upper left was my room after my sister went to college. Before that I shared the room on the upper right with my brother. My own room was small, with blue walls and there was a tunnel from the hallway into the large space above the garage. The house itself was a dark brown with an orange door when we bought it, and we promptly painted it mustard yellow. Don’t ask me why. If you look at the interior, though, you’ll see that whoever is living there now has even less taste than we did. You’ll also see the bay window in the family room where I learned to play chess, and a huge, wood-encased TV almost exactly like the one we had. I spent many a Saturday morning lying in front of that thing watching everything from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show to the Superfriends. The bookshelves to the right of it were piled with hundreds of old National Geographics. This was the room where my dad was sitting one morning when I came down for breakfast, surprising me as he was usually at work by that time, and realized that our house was surrounded by water after a hurricane. It’s also where I broke the news to my mom, as she was in the midst of a massive cleaning project, that I had flunked Mrs. Vanartsdalen’s 5th-grade English class.
The carpet in the living room looks to be the same awful green stuff we put in, but the kitchen has been repainted. The counter on the lower right is where we kept the cookie jar. That’s also where my mother, telling me I had to grasp the beaker holder more firmly, dashed some noxious mixture from my chemical set on the faux-brick linoleum floor. We kept the silverware in those drawers; it was easier for setting the table, to the left of the picture, for dinner. We saved the real dining room for special occasions.
The ad says the neighbors are great. All the assholes who lived in the area back then must have either mellowed out in their old age or moved away, in that case. Of course, they probably think the same thing about us. The deck in the back is new; we had a concrete patio there. My old fort in the backyard is gone, too, of course, but the pear tree whose fruit I sold door-to-door in the neighborhood is still there.
This is so amazing. I can’t believe I found this.
It seems that my childhood sometimes-friend/sometimes-enemy Chris Davis’ house is up for sale as well. Damn.
