Houses

Well, it didn't look like this. It was on the north end of Bloomington, Indiana, near a good sized farm (at the bottom of the hill.) The farm was all pasture land and they had horses out there when I was little. The Fells owned it. I delivered newspapers to them later, after they were rich from selling their land. But they never seemed to pay me. (Thrifty Hoosiers go to heaven.) It was a little neighborhood store with living quarters in the back. The living room door was off the side of the front porch and a bit away from the store's front door. It was long and narrow and there was a kitchen directly behind it and two more bedrooms behind that. The grocery store seemed huge when I was little. There was everything, including a meat counter and a big walk in freezer and a giant trap door that led to a giant basement. It had a large wooden front porch and we kids got to set up a little counter of our own in the summer time and sell penny candy from the store. Later the heavy wooden support posts rotted out and they replaced with aluminum supports. The store was shut down when I was around 10, I think. My father put in a wall covering up the meat counter and took out all the shelves and counters and fixtures and remodeled the store into a living room. The old living room became a bedroom for my brother and I. My bed was against the now permanently locked old front door. (My brother used to tease me about the boogy man coming through the door while I was asleep.) We had a joint back yard with my grandparents who lived behind us, but their house faced the side street. There was an old outhouse in the back corner of the yard. We had a lot of grass. I can remember playing on the front porch during a large summer thunderstorm. Except for what sometimes went on in the house, It wasn't a terrible place to grow up. I loved my mother and grandmother. The grown men, my father and grandfather were mean or useless. My brother remembered recently that he was walking down the side yard and I took a running leap from the front porch and tackled him in the grass. He probably won the wrestling match.