52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy and History - Week 4: Home

"Home is where one starts from." ~ T.S. Eliot

My home is and always has been in Marion, NY.  My first childhood home is actually the home I lived in when I first got married.  It is a double house that was owned by grandfather.  My parents lived here when they first got married and is the home where I started my childhood.  We lived in half of the house.  It had an eat in kitchen with a booth builtt in.  We had a dining room, a large living room with 2 big bedrooms and one bathroom upstairs.  My brother and I had to share a room.  One of my favorite parts of this house was and still is the side enclosed porch.  It is a great place to relax and read a book.  The house had an awesome backyard where my dad put in a swing and also built me a play house.  There was also a large patch of ferns that we used to play in.  We got yelled at for tromping them down but it was fun to play hide and seek in them.  One of the other great things about this house  was that I lived close to my cousin.  She lived in the other half of the house.  I remember she once packed her suitcase and ran away to my house.  My family owned three houses right in a row.  My grandpa great (Fred) lived right next door and then my grandma and grandpa Haskins lived in the house next to him.  I have lots of great  memories of living so close to them.

When I was in second grade we moved to a house on East Williamson Road, still in Marion.  This is where I spent the majority of my childhood.  That also was a great house.  I had an awesome bedroom; this time all to myself.  When we first moved in my room had red and blue wall paper.  Eventually we painted my room pink and I had pink shaggy carpet (it had like 2-3 tones of pink).  My room had a huge walk in closet, I think you could have put a single bed in it.  It was a cape cod so due to the dormers I had a nook in my bedroom where I kept all my dolls.  It made a great play space.  Our backyard was huge and we lived right near a creek which meant we spent a lot of time getting wet.  Our playroom was in the basement.  This is also where my piano was kept.  At one of the fireman auctions we got a gold colored couch that was kept down there.  My youngest brother used to take the pillows from the couch as use them as hockey goalie pads, some where I think there is a picture of this.  The house had 3 bedrooms, 2 upstairs and one small bedroom downstairs. Actually, it might have been considered a four bedroom because we had another small room downstairs that we stored stuff in.  It had one bathroom, also downstairs. It had one living room and a side sun porch. It didn't have a dining room but did have an eat in kitchen.  It had a fruit cellar, which was a small part of the basement with a dirt floor that was for storing vegetables and other produce.  We lived in this house until I was a senior in high school.

My final childhood home was back on the family compound near my first one.  My dad spent many years fixing up my grandpa great's (Fred) house.  This is where my parent's still live and the house I think of as my main childhood home however it is not the one where most of my childhood memories come from.