ForumGarden

I grew up in very nice homes. The first was out on Long Island. We played in the woods all day, caught fire flies at night, rode our bikes, had a ton of friends, and very big front lawns. Dinner was on the patio. Dad put white lattice work around it, monm planted Morning Glorys to grow up the sides.

Dinner was broiled chicken, corn on the cob, a beautiful salad, and the ever present loaf on itallian bread. Maybe once a week, when the ice cream man came by, we could get some. But other than that dessert was rare. Sometimes my mother would pack a picnic dinner. When dad got home from work we would head out to Jones Beach, eat, and sit on the sand till almost dark. We used to drive through the toll booth where Sunny from The Godfather was machine gunned down.

House number two was 50 miles in closer to the city. Nassau County. Lovely home. My high school years were wonderful. Sororitys and fraternities were big stuff in Nassau County. I made life long friends, and life long memories.

The Beatles were singing Revolution and Hey Jude. It was the hippie era. Everyone pretty much smoked pot, we loved each other. They world was our oyster, and all things were possible.

I didnt know it at the time.... but my mother and father didnt love each other. They didnt fight. I just thought they were boring. Money was always tight, there wasnt extra for them to do anything fun. They stayed together because they had us.

In 1972 my parents sold the house. My dad squandered away the profit.

( According to my mom ) They moved even closer to the city and rented an apartment. My youngest sister was still with them. Like an ass.... I got married, instead of going to school. Long haired hippie musician. Mamas boy.

Only child, in an Itallian family. In other words " A God" In my words " A vomit" Anyway..... that was how we became " Renters"

I work on huge pieces of property. Through the trees, and the lilac hedges, I see families sitting down to lunch on the patio. Or the dad futzing around in his work shop. Or the mom, kneeling... planting something. There are shelves in the garages of the houses where I work that hold nails that are 40 and 50 years old. The attics and basements are filled with the history of a family.

My heart aches. I feel such loss. A home place, held on to for years is a valuable and wonderful thing.

I can smell the chicken. I can see the slices of lemon floating in the ice tea pitcher. i can feel the breeze blowing through the lattice work on our patio.

My dad is 82. He lives with his 51 year old girlfriend, or companion as my sister and I prefer to think. My mom lives up on a hill. She is 77, a very old 77.She doesnt like anyone...... except my younger sister.

My sister is an attorney still on Long Island.

Im in Virginia. The boys are gone. I always think that I have given up the fantasy of having a home again. But really, I dont think you ever do. It is something most people need.

I grew up poor, lived in some real dumps. When there was a "father figure" in the picture, drugs, and physical abuse was also in the picture. I grew up with this very materialistic view of what a home was. I envied my friends large houses, perfect clothes, presentable parents ect. When I got married I was forever trying to nail down what my mind considered home. I wanted the fancy sitting room, large rustic kitchen, piano topped with pictures of perfectly happy people. There were several arguments between my husband and I. His opinion being home was wherever you and your family lived. It's not the material objects, it's the love that made the home.

I've come around to his thinking, but I still sometimes lust after the large house, rustic kitchen.

Weeder - those are nice memories

I never knew my parents didn't love eachother, I mean they never fought, something changed @ 1970, my mother started with excuses to go here, go there. I was suspicious of my mother having a affair.

One night after dinner and all chores were done - I layed down in the back of the Stationwagon - like clockwork my mother had to go somewhere..?

Not knowing I'm in the Stationwagon, my mother drove to this house..

Guess what ??

I get out of the car - knock on the door, you want to introduce me to your friend?

then I walked home.

I was brought up in one large home - 6 kids - alot of property - alot of friends.

Home without Love

My memories & relationships aren't as nice as yours..

I have a nice life & home now - and that's what counts

Patsy

Hubby and have rented this moble hime for over ten years now. It's not in a park, it stands by itself with a field in the back and the highway out front. We have planted cactus and flowers in the front, and we keep up the yard. The home itself looks like it has seen better days on the outside. It needs new siding which we can't afford right now. Any maintence is done by my hubby............we send the rent check by mail and hardly ever see the "landlords". The rent we pay is about all we can afford.

Inside, it is cluttered with our stuff from our 10 years together as well as some stuff from our previous lives. We feel comfortable and content. Two people who love each other live here. It is home.

I am the oldest of 6 children. We moved two times growing up to accomodate the growing family. My dad was the sole provider as my mom was at home takiing care of us, cooking, housekeeping, etc. I really appreciate that. We always had food on the table, a clean house, and even family time together playing board games, watching TV, going to a museum or the zoo. We were also the family that went to church every Sunday. I did not like to ask my folks for money, because even at a young age, I knew they were on a tight budget. I do have good memories of those homes, but that time seems like an early chapter of my life. It is like I was another person....the child of myself.

My first hubby was in the military, so we moved every three years. Every place we lived, I felt it was my duty to make this new place a home. And I did the best I could. With babies and children, making the place you live "homey" was a necessity. I did this for almost 20 years. This was no easy task with a spouse who was a consistent controller and criticizer. That was another chapter of my life...the young wife and mother of myself.

None of the men I married or had long term relationships wanted houses. I made the apartments we lived in homes. Home can be food cooking in the warm kitchen... everything nice and clean. A bathromm that smells nice. Candles and a cozy bedroom. The circumstances that I encounter where people have been in family homes for years and years are rare. Thats what makes them so special, I guess. Its the continuity, not the material posessions that make me envious. The rose bushes that have been in the ground for thirty years. The bedrooms upstairs that belonged to the children long gone... but where they sleep when they come to visit. I am smart enough to know that managing to hold on to these things doesnt necessarily mean that the women were happy. They stuck it out. I think thats part of what I envy.. or admire. I didnt stick it out. If I was unhappy, I moved on.

Had some unforgettable experiences. Actually I read my own writing but I realize... for me hearth and home just werent worth staying with the wrong partner. Because your all right... home can be a cave with someone you love to share it with.

I was born the youngest of five in the rural south. We probably didn't have money, but we had cows with milk, chickens with eggs, a large garden with veggies. There was always lots of yelling & fighting. It didn't occur to me that the parents shouldn't do this every bit as much as the kids did.



Divorce came when I was 10 & screwed up my perfect world. Whatever money we had apparently left with Daddy. Livestock was sold, we ate the chickens. The two older kids were grown by then, and the next older one was in his rebellious phase, so the garden didn't get tended like it was supposed to. The only time I remember feeling poor was when Mama came in with a big box of identical socks - Mint green fuzzy socks - that seemed to never wear out. I even had to wear them in gym class.



Mama died. I was almost 13. Going through the foster care system, I learned to make home an imaginary sphere that surrounded me and stayed with me wherever I went. I had to.



That served me well throughout my military career. Doesn't matter much where you live when home is an imaginary sphere. My beloved joined me.



We have a nice average size house in an average neighborhood. I don't need much in the way of material things. As long as my beloved is here, my home is resplendent.

This is a touching thread, hearing all your home stories. The thing I appreciated about my childhood home was the space to be free like you described, weeder. It wasn't about having the right look but it was important that I had no aggravations thrown in when I was most interested in serving my curiosity about life.

Makes me sad when kids can't have this freedom due to lots of strife placed before them. The stress causes children to put their own persons on the back burner while they concern themselves with adult issues. Even basic comforts like food and shelter! Then throw in arguing parents, moms and dads boyfriends/girlfriends, moving around because you're forced to escape situations, all make kids put their own lives on hold. Even when they pretend they aren't affected I don't believe it.

No situation is ideal though. From adversity comes wisdom. When homelife is disturbed things are really shaken up and possibly for the good. One could look at all childhood homes as the way things were meant to be.

Erin

Oh good, a chance to just babble on, run me gums a bit and bore people to tears, I'm really good at that. I grew up in a small seaside town in southwestern Nova Scotia. The house was a 24 foot cube, made of cement rock face blocks that my father made in the evenings after working like a dog all day. The block molds belonged to my grandfather who was a mason in the area. Our home was next to my grandparents home, a one story rock face block house with a huge sunken cement fish pond. In the winter we would go over the fence to watch the fish swimming beneath the ice. My grandfather loved the fruit trees he had growing along our bordering fence. At one thyme he grafted a apple and a cherry tree together and I can remember picking apples that were pink inside the peel and tasted remarkably of cherry. I also remember he would come out on his front step w/ a broom and chase away the pigeons from his roof.

My father worked for Coca Cola Bottling and when we were little tykes, and one of my favorite childhood memories is that of waiting at the end of our driveway with my sister Connie, for our father to come home in the big red truck with a tea coloured tarp covering the load of wooden soda bottle cases. We would stand right in the driveway so he had to stop and pick us up. The two of us would climb high up into the cab, and dad would put the truck in low gear and drive us into the driveway. We thought we were on top of the world sitting up there in that big truck. I find it amusing now, because the truck barely fit into the drive w/o the back wheels hanging out onto the sidewalk. :-2

In our basement, which my father dug by hand, was a sawdust burning furnace with a hopper that reached almost to the kitchen floor above. My brother Jim and I loved to shovel the truck loads of sawdust in through the basement windows and into the bins below. Every evening we would go down to the basement, grab a mop bucket and fill the hopper with sawdust which would last well into the next evening. I'm not sure you could find many kids today that would find that fun, but we thought it was.

Every inch of that home was built by my father, from the blocks to the brick fireplace, to the fancy woodwork, it was all done by his huge hands. On the wall next to the stairs going up to the bedrooms, my second oldest brother who was a sign painter and artist by the age of 13, painted a life size Santa, sleigh, and 8 reindeer. Being so young my mother told him he could dew it if he used water paints, no doubt so she could wash it off immediately after Christmas was over. I can't remember what year that was, but it remained there until long after my brother moved to Ontario as a young man.

Speaking of Christmas, my siblings and I knew that the good presents, you know, the ones Santa brought, were always wrapped in brown butcher paper, and even getting clothes was something to look forward to, especially if it was a toronto Maple Leafs jersy. Back in those days there were only 6 teams remember. I recall my father sitting there yelling at the tv when someone hogged the puck, passing made the game in his eyes, and I must admit, it seemed mo like hockey than WWF back then.

My mother was a little woman, by that I mean very thin, and like my father, she was a hard worker. She often worked as a maid at local hotels, and ran several businesses with my father and one w/ my oldest brother. In the summer thyme they ran a canteen at Lake Milo, a Lake at the very opposite side of town, with a large boat house. In the winter they ran the canteen at the local ice rink. I can't mention the ice rink w/o remember the thyme my mother was getting ready to open the canteen for the evening hockey game crowd. She told my brother, the artist, to grab a wooden chair and take it and me, the youngest of the family, out onto the ice and teach me to skate. A few minutes later she glanced out the window to see me sitting in the chair w/ my brother pushing me around the rink. Not quite what she had in mind at all. :-5

And then there was the BonaVista Restuarant she ran with my oldest brother, except he usually didn't show up to dew much of the work, so I think that only lasted 2 years before wearing my poor ole mom out. mom made the best homemade bread in the world, and her molasses bread was awesome. She could bake a pie like no ones business, and with any dough that was left over she would bake them into what she called doughmen. they looked like snowmen but were made of pie dough and baked in the oven where no snowman would survive. In the kitchen my father had built an ironing board cabinet, when you opened the door the wooden ironing board was inside held by a wooden dowel hinge, that allowed it to neatly fold down onto its sturdy leg.

We had a huge yard compared to most, and in the middle of the side lawn was a 4X4 post that stuck above ground level by about 1 foot. That is where we six children stood to get onto our bicycles to learn how to ride. Behind it was a large bluestone rock my dad dug out of our basement when building the house. My brother, (the artist) thot it looked a lot like Fred Flintstones house, so he painted it white, with a door and windows to match that of Fred and Wilma's. Beside that, another stone on which he painted "BEDROCK".

Our front and back yards were seperated by black and red current bushes, from which my dad made jams that all the neighbours begged him for. In the winter, my dad would come home from work, have his supper and then go out with a water hose and flood the entire backyard so we kids could have a place to learn how to skate. I recall sitting for hours watching my father figure skate there, he was so graceful, one would never know he had a wooden leg from the thyme he was 16.

Along the back fence, were so many beautiful red, pink and white roses that my father nurtured, and fussed over. He never allowed a rose to die on the bush, he would clip them and give them in large numbers to some of the ladies in the surrounding houses. I have no idea how the man found the thyme nor the energy to keep the home looking so beautiful, and he was always making something from wood. No power tools back then, everything he did was done with hand tools. My father always had work for my next oldest brother and I to dew, which always troubled me as a child, but I thank him now for all he taught me. :-6 They say you can never go home again, but every year I dew by putting the same angel atop our tree that was used when I was a lad, and I still look forward to the presents wrapped in brown butchers paper the most. :yh_drool

Dew

"anything worth dewing is worth dewing well"