After breakfast on Thursday, I decided to walk across town to my old house on Eddy Street.
1265 Eddy. It was part of a first-time home owners project. There were to be 6 homes built, 3 on each of two different streets. The future homeowners took part in the construction process.
I recall afternoons after school, visiting the work sites where my mother was busy hammering nails and hoisting lumber.
After construction, I lived in a big two-story home with a nice yard, a tree out back, and my dog. I had my own room, and we had a guest room for company. The home was originally blue and did not have the awning over the garage.
We planted cherry and pear trees in the front yard and blueberry bushes out back. The front yard also had a small vegetable and flower garden. My mother also got a magnolia tree with pink blossoms and planted it behind the house.
Jana and Ruby, both friends of my mother who also had sons I used to play with, would stay with us on occasion. Ruby had a little one-eyed cat, I think its name was Fafnir. Jana would often visit from Canada.
I would ride my bicycle to Grant Street, where I attended an alternative school program called ICE. It provided some classroom instruction for home-schooled children. After graduating from ICE, I attended the local high school through my sophomore year. From then on, I rode the bus most mornings, unless I slept in.
My mother worked at the nurse’s station at Jefferson Hospital for a while, but she couldn’t continue.
The housing was an inventive idea, but we couldn’t make the payments on the mortgage and sadly had to sell the home. We got very little after paying the bank back. After that, we lived in a single-wide trailer outside of town on a gravel and dirt track named Hidden Trails Road.
Continued in On Walkabout: Hidden Trails Road
