What it was like where I grew up

 One of the blogs I read has a series of prompts called 99 Questions to Ask Your Grandparents and this  question hit home for me, pun intended.  What was like where you grew up? Can you describe the neighborhood in detail?

the house I grew up in until age 10, pictured in 2007

     My sister claims that my memory is poor for our childhood, but I think its truer to say that I have managed to forget a lot of negative things. However, I do remember our house in Lubbock and probably could navigate it to this day.  As a child, I thought the house and yards to be quite big.  The back yard was divided into two halves by a wire fence  - one side had a big Mimosa tree, a clothesline, and irises planted against the house. My father had nailed an armchair up into the tree, with steps leading up, as a sort of makeshift treehouse where we would sit and read.  Around the base of the tree was a built in picnic table where we enjoyed watermelon in the summer, throwing the seeds and rims over the fence into the alley where they became a watermelon patch.   Grapevines were planted against the gated wire fence.  The other side of the yard had a built-in sandbox, a swing set, two dogs with a doghouse, and the backdoor to the house which was in constant motion.

     We had no garage, but a carport for shade.  There was a built in brick planter near the front door where we regularly tried our hand at growing marigolds.  Three trees planted in a circle in the front yard represented my sister, brother, and myself.  For the longest time, the lot next to us was vacant and we rode our bikes all through it.  We would cross the road to the neighboring cotton field and have dirt clod wars.  Someone was always getting injured (sometimes in a terrible way) and my mother had Mercurochrome on hand for everything. The yards, driveways, and sidewalks in our neighborhood were always full of kids of all ages - on bikes or on foot, playing various games until dark when we were all called in for the day.  We drank from the yard hose, ran in briefly to eat lunch or use the potty, and basically wore ourselves out.  Summers were hot as hell, winters brought snow.  We were outside constantly, mostly barefoot. Catching horned toads and running the neighborhood. 

     The house had 3 bedrooms and two bathrooms, and my father had finished out the garage into a living space where he slept and had a desk.  Previous to that, there were bunkbeds in there where several of my older siblings slept.  We had a very small eat-in kitchen and a small living room. Although there was no fireplace, I remember there being a cut out space in the wall connecting the kitchen to the living room, and a small child could have crawled into it, and did.  My mother did all of the cooking and laundry and cleaning.  She also sewed our clothes.  We rarely ate out. 

     We knew our neighbors and they knew us.  The Hadaways, the Lassaters, the Prichards, the Fosters, Mr. Haney.  We were within walking distance of our school and church. We had one TV and watched the evening news, Gunsmoke, Gilligan's Island, Captain Kangaroo, and Saturday cartoons. We listened to records on my father's stereo system that had a speaker in each room.

     My childhood home is with me and part of me always, of course.  Not all of my childhood was joyous, but our house in Lubbock was a formative place in my life that shaped me for everything to come, including raising my children and creating my home.