Home Sweet Home

One of my writing prompts was to tell about all the places I’ve lived. Compared to Marvin, I’ve been pretty stationary. His family moved around a LOT.

My first house was in Kansas City, KS. I don’t remember much about it except it had a nice backyard and my dad put in a brick patio. In later years, it was referred to as “Dorothy’s House” because that’s where we lived right after I was born.

When I was about 2 years old, we went to live with my grandparents because my mom had a miscarriage. We lived in the apartment above my grandparent’s grocery store. It had a pull-down ladder to get into the attic, which I was never allowed to go. It also had a basement with very scary, dark stairs. I was terrified of the basement. We lived there until after my brother was born. When he was 6 months old and I was 4 ½ we moved to California.

We lived in Bellflower in a very small house until we could move my grandparents out to live with us. That was a much bigger house with a big backyard. There was a brick barbeque and several fruit trees. One was a loquat tree. I don’t remember much about the fruit, but I LOVED playing with the large seeds. They were like treasured jewels to me. I would gather them up and hide them around the yard.

When I was 7, we moved to Chico. We lived in a small flat-top neighborhood across the street from the elementary school Parkview. It had a tiny backyard. About a year later we moved to Skyway Ave. out by the tank farm. And that’s where I lived for 15 years until I got married. Wonderful rural neighborhood. The biggest downside was having to ride the school bus every day. It took about an hour to and from because the route was so spread out among the farms and orchards.

When Marv and I got married, we lived in Paradise in a very small uninsulated house we called our “Honeymoon Hovel”. It was next to an abandoned apple orchard where we could get all the apples we wanted. I made SO MANY pies the two years we lived there.

We moved to Oroville in 1978. We’d been married for 2 years. I wasn’t real happy about leaving Paradise and the pine trees, but once we got involved in the Lutheran church here, and made friends, I came to really love the place. Summer of 2018 will make it 40 years we’ve been here.