My Childhood Home (s)

Some of us are writing a blog entry about our childhood home. In my case, that would be HOMES....growing up, the longest I lived anywhere was 5 years, so it will take a bit of thinking to remember them all.
The house we lived in when i was first born was an old manse, my father being a pastor. I don't remember a whole lot about it, other than it was big and had a spiral staircase. This was the house where our kitty decided to adopt us. She was a stray, and about 1 year old when she showed up. I was 2 at the time. We lived there until I was 3.
The second house we lived in was another large, old manse. I remember this one a bit more....it had the old fashioned set up, complete with sitting room, dining room, everything separated by sliding doors. It had a huge staircase, and I slept in a bunk bed in a room I shared with my sister. I remember the school where I went to kindergarten being right across the road, and going over there on Canada Day to burn sparklers and shoot off a few small fireworks. My brother was born when I was in kindergarten, and I remember thinking he was ugly. LOL. We lived there until I was 6.
The third house we had was a temporary house that we lived in for about a year, and was 4 provinces away. I'm not sure what the story with that one was, but I remember it had a fireplace in the basement which we thought was really cool. There was a park nearby where the entire play structure was made out of old tires, ranging from car tires to massive tractor wheels. I remember we always would watch the Muppet Show together in the kitchen, and a classmate of mine was my backdoor neighbour.
The fourth house we lived in was in the same city, but on the other end of town. It was another old manse. I loved that place. We had a massive playroom in the basement, and the bedrooms we slept in were upstairs, where the ceiling was basically the roof....the ceilings slanted and met in a peak. The furniture was built right in up there, beds, desk, drawers, everything built right into the walls/floor, so the arrangement was, obviously, permanent. We had a nice, big backyard with a swingset and sandbox, picnic table.....your basic backyard, I guess. We had a weeping willow tree that eventually got cut down, which i thought was really sad, and some giant blue spruce trees that were amazing in the winter.....the snow would not get under the branches, so we could dig a door under the branches and have a nice, insulated playhouse made out of the branches and the space under them. The house also had a huge closet you could sit in, great for hide and seek, and a prayer closet for my Mom. I used to stay in the spare room on nights when I couldn't sleep, because my Mom had all her sewing stuff in there, and I'd sit and make Barbie clothes all night.
In winter, I remember my parents getting up on the roof of the carport to shovel it off, having so much snow one year that when we opened the gate to the backyard, it was just a wall of snow, as high as the gate itself. I remember my parents shovelling the driveway and putting all the snow in the middle of the front yard each year, so we could slide down it on our sleds. I remember the slugs that would crawl up and down our driveway wall, and I remember I wasn't scared of spiders yet. I remember that about a half block away, just on the side of the mountain we lived on, there was a huge patch of wild saskatoon berry bushes, and we would all go berry picking each year, eating more than we brought home. I remember going on family walks, which took 2 hours, all the way to the other end of town, just to buy a slurpee. I would always get a mix of orange and sprite, if they had it. I remember going on a hiking picnic up a ski mountain one year. We did a lot of fun stuff there. We moved when I was 11.
My fifth house was back across the country, 5 provinces away. It was yet another old manse, right beside the church. I would love to have a house like that today. It was gorgeous. The basement wasn't finished, just concrete, but it had a raised platform that became our play are, and had two closed off rooms, one was holding the deep freeze, and the other, I believe was cold storage and just general storage. The backyard was huge, because at the time they hadn't built anything behind it, so it even had a small slope leading to a field that was perfect for sledding. The main floor had a half bath, an office, an entryway, a living room with doors at each entrance, a big dining room, a nice sized kitchen, and a deck off the back. The upstairs had 4 bedrooms and a full bath. And two of the bedrooms were huge, one being the master bedroom, and one was split in two, part of the time as a shared room, part of the time being a bedroom with half cordonned off for sewing and computer use. I remember spending all of my Christmas holidays studying for January exams. I would memorize for hours every day, and then would breeze through the exams, because I could literally SEE my notes in my head. I remember putting up yellow wallpaper in my room. I remember having huge fights with my sister and brother, and accidentally slamming my brother's fingers in the door. To this day, I can still hear his fingers crunch. *shudder*. That was the house where I got chicken pox for the third time, baffling the doctors. That was the house where I developed my biggest fear in needles, thanks to an incompetent nurse, and a poor lab guy whose only fault was that he had the misfortune of looking like a gorilla, and so when he was
called in to try to replace the incompetent nurse, got to see just how hysterically terrified a 12 year old can get. (He, by the way, managed to get the needle in and out with no problems, once I was restrained, for which I think he was eternally grateful). I remember going for 3 1/2 hour walks on the back yards as a family, seeing wildlife and watching the maple leaves turn in the fall, and the snow and ice melting in the spring. I remember the old fashioned merry-go-round by the beach, the beach itself, the little waterfall that nobody knew about up the stream that we found by walking a little obscure dirt patch through the trees. I remember Pop Shoppe pop and double ice cream cones at the parlour that had special ice cream cones with two cup on each cone (looked a bit like an 8 on top). I remember the huge fire that burned down a set of low income housing and even got so bad that there was an explosion. I remember walking to school one day and having a car go through a huge puddle so fast that the splash went as high as the power lines and got me soaked. I remember our old dog Sparky getting old and cranky, having her bite me one morning because I teased her, and coming home to find my parents had put her down. I thought it was my fault for almost a decade, until I told my Mom, and she put my fears to rest. I remember going across the river on the ferry. And I remember Justine. She was an amazing woman. She was very, very old, and didn't get out much anymore, not much past her front steps. She lived alone, right across the street from us, in a very old house. I had a school project in French that required me to talk to someone older. I asked if I could interview her, and I don't think I've ever seen anyone so happy. I got to go inside her house, which had not been updated much over the years, which was fascinating in itself. She was a teacher when she was young, and she talked for hours and hours about it (for my project), so much so that my Mom had to come and get me. It was so amazing to be 14 and talk to someone who had taught in the early 1900's. I also remember we had a rotary phone. I miss those, to a certain extent. They were cool. We lived there until I was 14, almost 15.
My sixth house was back across the country again, 4 provinces away. It was a 4 bedroom, 2 bath house.You walked in the door and either had to go up or down. Up was 2 bedrooms, a full bath, living room, and kitchen (and closets), and downstairs was 2 bedrooms, a full bath, and a den which got split in two, one part being my Dad's office. I remember a lot of things to do with school, but not a whole lot to do with home. I was having problems by then, problems that had started when i was 13 (a whole other story), and had progressively gotten worse. I remember being in I.B. and doing a lot of homework. I remember crushes that were not reciprocated. I remember being very shy and self-conscious. I remember thinking my academics were what would gain me approval at home, and that losing weight would make me the beautiful girl I wanted to be. The first part wasn't true, and the second part just never happened (the losing weight and getting beautiful part). I have very good memories of the place, and a lot of good memories about my time there, especially connected to school and the friends that i had there, but I think that was also the place where I had the worst trouble with dealing with growing up and who and what I was.
If you'd like to talk about YOUR childhood home, join the crowd and check out http://owlhaven.wordpress.com/2007/07/20/my-childhood-home-2/