I'm happy to say that mom and dad are still living in that house, as I write this. However, there have been many changes over the years, so I'm going to refer to the house in the past tense.
Oddity #1 - One and a Half Stories
The house was officially one-and-a-half stories. That means that the upper floor didn't have straight walls that went all the way up to the ceiling. They went straight up about 3 feet, and then angled in toward each other, like an A-frame, before terminating at a horizontal ceiling that was about half the size of the floor. You could hit your head on the slanted part, and I often did. This was not only hard to explain to other people, but it created a "crawl space" at either side of my room between the short vertical walls and the angled roof that continued down past them. Mom and dad used this area for storage. I remember all the variety of "Washington Apples" boxes packed in there, full of grown-up stuff. I don't know what was in those boxes, old books probably, and some Christmas decorations.
At some point, I moved many of those boxes out of my way and had a pretty fantastic little fort back there. There were two openings in my bedroom, so I could have a back and a front door. The openings were covered by old sheets or towels that hung from nails - or they were open. It was up to me. Mostly this area was referred to as "The tunnel" and it was a great source of joy in my life. In the fourth grade, I got my hands on my own string of colored, mini Christmas lights and strung them up in there. Nothing could have been finer. That reddish, colored glow was simply magical. I'd line the floor with layers of soft blankets and drag in an assortment of pillows and stuffed animals. I'm sure it was a world class fire hazard. In the summer I'd have a fan in one end, blowing a torrent of cool air all the way through from one end to the other. There was a particular smell in there, some combination of plywood, drywall, insulation and dust. It was a comforting smell. Like an old house. It seems like just the kind of place that would be inhabited by spiders, but thankfully I don't recall meeting any. It was all mine, a fortress of solitude.
My little fort was not very roomy - it was a quite confined space. Only enough room to lay prone or maybe sit cross-legged when I was really little. I was always banging my head, elbows and knees on the walls and exposed studs. I remember enjoying that space until I was too big to move about in there at all. I started getting stuck and had to abandon my little fort. I had many good years in there.
I can still see the artwork that was printed on the sides of those old apple boxes: Plen-T-Color, Mad River, Red Delicious - there were others. The names and artwork on those boxes were a regular background item in my young life. I would sit and stare at them, contemplating what they meant and wondering why grownups often spelled things strangely even though I wasn't allowed to. I remember noticing that the colors frequently didn't line up. That kind of thing would bother me. I had the same frustration with comic books.
Oddity #2 - The Laundry Room
The laundry room was a little closet off the dining room. I believe it had a curtain of some kind instead of a door. This was an important room for many reasons - to a kid. This is where the upright freezer was, on top of which were stored Christmas gifts. The pile would grow from November to December, some wrapped, some in plastic shopping bags. Watching that pile grow was a magical thing. In later years the laundry room was also a great place to take a phone call. In my early teen years we were still tethered by corded phones, so there was very little privacy for the romantically inclined conversationalist. Thankfully, one could drag the phone from the dining room, into the laundry room, perch rather comfortably on top of the dryer and speak with relative privacy. But none of these things really qualify as "oddities." I'm getting to that.
In the ceiling of the room was a small recess. Just one of the handful of unfinished fixtures about the house. There were a few locations that had capped wires poking out - some switch or light that never got installed. Mom told me that the laundry room was originally intended to be a bathroom, and that the box in the ceiling was where a ventilating fan would go. We didn't have a fan that room or the upstairs bathroom. At other people's houses I remember always being annoyed that I never knew which switch turned on the damn light and which one turned on those stupid fans that everyone had. I didn't want the fan. I never wanted the fan. I didn't even know what it was for. The switches in our bathroom made me happy. They both turned on lights. Lights in a dark room make sense. Fans do not. I went for years, in other people's homes, dreading the dumb bathroom switches because you never knew which one was the "right" switch that turned on the light, and which one was the trick switch that turned on a noisy, pointless fan, and left you still fumbling in the dark - while announcing to everyone in the building that someone was about to take a crap. I didn't want that much publicity associated with my restroom visits. It was like drawing the joker when you hit the fan switch. I'm glad we didn't have a fan in our bathroom.
Anyway, our downstairs bathroom was never finished as such (it became a laundry room) and so the fan was never installed. That's fine because if dad had installed that fan, those birds would have had no place to nest. Every spring, we'd hear the clatter of little claws on galvanized ducts. You could see a robin darting in and out of the vent pipe on the outside of the house (that's the pipe that you can see in the brown strip of trim in the middle of the house, in the photo below). Before long, you'd hear the frantic chirping of little baby birds at feeding times. I always enjoyed those little birds. They would show up just as the daffodils were blooming.
Here's a recent photo. Some of the trees have grown up, and dad's mural has been painted over, but besides that, the house looks very much the same as it did in 1984:
Oddity #3 - Painted Floors
Like most kids, probably, I spent a lot of time on the floor, building with Legos, playing with cars and flipping through books. At some point I realized that everyone in the world (except us) had sweet, glorious carpet. How I loved carpeting! It was so soft and welcoming. I recently told someone that we didn't have carpeting in my childhood home and they responded with something like "Well, hardwoods are nice too..." - yes, I'd agree, but we didn't have hardwoods either. Our floors were painted particle board, baby blue in my room. The kitchen and bathroom had tiles, and the stairs had their little strip of shaggy brown carpet. but everything else was painted particle board. I've since learned that that is called "sub floor" - indeed. It wasn't very resistant to wear. I remember the high-traffic areas being somewhat eroded and having little worn-out depressions. In one place, where Erik spilled a glass of orange juice (he was always spilling orange juice), the floor got soggy, expanded like a sponge and become crumbly and brittle when it dried out. That left quite a pit by the time we were done picking at it. On the plus side, a fresh coat of paint made most of it look brand new.
I still like carpeting probably more than most folks. It always seems like a special treat. I'm quite contented to roll around on the floor. It's like the whole house is wearing pajamas on the inside!
I'll just include this little list to remind myself of other interesting features, so I can write about them in the future:
• Bavarian trim makes for great out-the-window escapes.
• I'm now a permanent toe-stepper thanks to those creaky stairs and dad's light sleeping.
