Fifteen, part 1

I’ve moved fifteen times. “Wow, that’s a lot”, you say? It’s ok. I say it too. Here is number one through five. The rest will come in Part 2 and Part 3.

 

1. (J.E. Robins Elem School) I started out on Georgia Street in Charleston, WV. This house was owned originally by my father’s side of the family. It was pretty small and next to a railroad. And when I say “next to”, I mean you could lay a grown man with his feet touching our fence and his stretched out arms would be touching the train tracks. It was a one bedroom house. As you would walk on to the porch and go through the front door, you would enter the living room. There were two doorways from there. To the left was the dining room and straight forward was the bedroom. And from those two rooms, there were entrances to the kitchen. So it basically formed a square. Off to the side of the bedroom was the one bathroom and off to the back of the bedroom was another smaller room. This little room was my bedroom and was the one that I shared with my brother when he was born. I’m not sure what this room was originally for though. Off of the back of the kitchen was the back door which led to a detached garage and the back yard. Eventually the front porch was screened in.

This house has my earliest memories. I know that I spent the majority of my time here with my biological mother seeing as my dad was a truck driver, but I really don’t have many memories of time with her at this house. I do remember that any time it would storm, my dad would take me on the front porch to watch the storm and show me that it couldn’t hurt me. I now do this with Timothy and Thomas. I also remember spending a day outside with my dad planting bushes along the fence next to the train tracks. I drove by there the first time I took Brian and the kids to West Virginia and those bushes are still there… taller, but there. One morning, I woke up and found a cat toy on the floor and asked what it was for which led to me being told to go in the garage where there was a kitten (Furman). We also had a beagle mix (Puppy), a stray golden retriever (Goldie), several rabbits (One was Bob and another was Nathan… I don’t remember the other ones.), and a couple raccoons. I’ve heard a story about me picking on Bob all the time and one day when he was out of his cage, he stood on his hind legs, hissed at me, and chased me around the back yard causing me to lock myself inside of his cage so he couldn’t get me. I remember finding Nathan at the playground outside of the church we went to and taking him home.

We lived in this house until I was about seven and Stephen was three or four. My dad had fallen off the back of his tractor trailer and slipped discs in his lower back. The doctors told him that he wouldn’t be able to sit for long periods anymore, he decided to go back to school. The school he enrolled in was in Beckley, WV so my parents made the decision to move to a halfway point. He would be closer to school and she wouldn’t be too far from work.

2. (Oak Hill Elem) The house that my parents bought was in Oak Hill, WV. Compared to the house we had before, the new house was a palace. The main floor was laid out like a rectangle. The front door led to the living room. This room had two additional doorways – one towards the back of the house and the other to the left. Going through the living room towards the back would lead you into a small room that I called the library (we kept the bookcases in here). Behind the library was a hallway that would lead three ways – to the back was a huge room that my dad used as his den, to the right was a bathroom, and to the left the hallway continued. At the end of that section of the rectangle, you could either go right to the master bedroom (which had another bathroom attached and was the same size as the den) or go left into the dining room. Straight through the dining room would lead into the kitchen past a stairwell. Off of the back of the kitchen was a side door to go outside and there was another doorway into the living room completing the rectangle. Up the stairs was a huge landing and a long hallway. By the landing was another very large room that Stephen and I used as our play room for all of his cars and all of my Barbies. In the middle of the hallway was a half bath (that was very creepy – I only used that one if the other two were occupied) and at the end were two long and narrow bedrooms side-by-side. My bedroom was on the left and Stephen’s bedroom was on the right.

This house has several memories also. I found a squirrel that was being attacked by a cat. I shooed the cat away and ran to get my dad. We brought it home and put some Neosporin on it and wrapped it in gauze. Poor squirrel didn’t make it, but we did what we could.

The last winter I was there was the host of the biggest blizzard in many, many years. We were under a state of emergency for two weeks – the power was out for most of this time so everyone put their food from their fridge and freezer into coolers and buried it in the snow to preserve it as long as possible. Since we were the only ones on the street with a gas powered stove, we became a heat source. We put up a blanket to cover the stairs so the heat wouldn’t go upstairs and turned on the burners on the stove. We also cooked everyone’s food and took it to their house or they would come over to eat. We would put snow in the bathtubs to melt so we would have water to flush toilets and to wash dishes. The snow plow piled all the snow from my hill at the bottom where the street became a dead end – once they finally made it to our street. But one day, I got the brilliant idea to put on my in-line skates and go down this hill… on an ice patch. Needless to say, I went down this hill unable to stop, flinging my arms everywhere, until I crashed into the snow pile. We also made some killer forts in this pile where we would launch snowballs from.

This is also the last house that we all lived in as a family – my biological mother, dad, brother, and myself – before my Dad went to live with Cherie, the woman that would become my step-mother and then my Mom. I believe I mentioned in another blog about when my biological mother had my brother and I put our dad’s clothes in trash bags and throw them out onto the snow. If you remember that, this is the place we were living at. This was just before the blizzard.

3. (Staunton Elem) We didn’t stay in that house for long after my parents separated. We had no reason to be so far away from my mother’s work or our family, so we moved to South Charleston, WV into a house that is owned by my grandparents – it was the house that my mother grew up in. It was much smaller than our previous house, but wasn’t too small since it was just the three of us. You walked in the front door from the porch and entered the living room. It spanned the width of the front of the house into an “L” shape. The top of the “L” lead to the galley style kitchen and then to the dining room area. To the left was another little hallway with a bathroom straight ahead and a bedroom on each side. My room was to the left and my brother’s room was to the right. Going straight through the dining room led to another hallway. To the right was the laundry room and back door that led to the carport. Almost to the end of the hallway was another bedroom to the left and the master bedroom at the very end. To the right inside the master was an attached bath. There was also a partially finished basement that was only accessible through an entrance in the front of the house that we had to walk down the sidewalk a little bit to get to. I kept the majority of my toys down there and made a “school room” where I was always the teacher and my brother was always the student.

I don’t have too many memories at this house that I’m fond of. One is when my dad was bringing us home from a weekend visit with him (those didn’t happen very often) and there was an ambulance in front of my house. Apparently my mother was having chest pains. Another is not having much to eat – there was one point where all we had was Taco Bell and cereal. In fact, we ate Taco Bell so much that I get stomach sick now if I eat it. And another is catching my mother with the first boyfriend that she had post-divorce – that I knew of at the time. We came home from school and she was on top of him on the couch. I had never been as mad at her as I was at that moment. I believe this is where we were living when Puppy and Goldie died. We buried both of them at my grandparent’s house in a little clearing at the entrance to the woods behind their house. Goldie loved to watch the deer go in and out of this clearing, so we thought that would be the best place to bury her. When Puppy passed, we decided she needed to be with Goldie. This is also where we lived when my mother met the man that she is married to now – Jeff.

*** When my mother decided to be with Jeff, we were supposed to move to Richmond, VA to be close to his son. Mind you, we barely knew Jeff. When we got there, we had to stay in a hotel until we could find a place to live. (We never actually moved there, so I don’t count it when I say I’ve moved 15 times.) One bittersweet thing that I remember from this time was meeting a little boy that would, unknowingly to me, become my step-brother – Nathanial. It was good because I met him but bad because I was not allowed to tell him my name or who I was. His mother, understandably, did not want my mother around him.

4. (Lexington Park Middle) We bounced around from hotel to hotel for about a month or so until we landed in Lexington Park, MD where Jeff supposedly had a job offer. We had a small apartment above a Laundromat. When you walked through the front door, you could go left or right. Going left would take you into the living room then dining area and then to the kitchen – almost in a “U” shape. If you went right from the front door, you would turn a corner into a hallway. On the left of the hallway was the only bathroom, to the right was my bedroom, and at the end was the room that my mother shared with Jeff. This apartment only had two bedrooms, so we took furniture and made “walls” in the dining area to make a “room” for my brother. We lived here for six weeks. (Yes, I said weeks.)

If you’ve read any of my other blogs, you already know what happened here. This is where I said my first cuss word. Not just any word – it was the F word. There was a huge argument and as a result, my mother locked herself in the bathroom and Jeff was trying to beat down the door. My brother and I hid on the other side of my bed on the floor. Finally, I had enough and went out into the hallway and told him that he was not allowed to talk to her like that and to get the F out of the house. Screaming, of course. I know I threw his keys at him at some point.

5. (Staunton Elem) We abruptly left there. And when I say “abruptly”, I mean I was told to pack my things on a Wednesday because we were leaving that Saturday. From there, we moved back to South Charleston, WV to a duplex where there was an upstairs and a downstairs – we had the downstairs and it was only accessible from an alley. The front of the apartment was in the shape of a rectangle with the galley style kitchen immediately to the right from the front door. Straight ahead would take you into the living room and it circled back around to the other side of the kitchen through the dining area. Off of the dining area was a hallway that went in an “L” shape. I don’t remember where the bathroom was in this apartment, but I do know there was only one. My mother and Jeff’s room was almost at the end of the “L” and mine was completely at the end. Again, we didn’t have a room for my brother so we made “walls” again with furniture.

We didn’t stay here long either. This is when I met my step-sister, Natalie. Not too long after she started coming for visits, she decided she wanted to move in. We didn’t even have enough room for the four of us, much less if we tried to make it five people, so we moved again.

 

 

 

To be continued.....