Bought a house

My parents went through the Depression; they are prepared, almost reflexively, for things to go wrong. Of course, I’m the sixth of seven children; they had years of experience before I came along. Lots of things did go wrong and they had to improvise. It’s the nature of living.

I think, for my dad, moving to Greybull, Wyoming, when I was a toddler, and buying a house, was kind of like when my husband and I moved to Fort Wayne and bought a house, after years of peregrination. My parents stayed in that house until they moved in with my sister and her husband at an advanced age. Before that they moved several times within a couple different states. In buying a house they probably felt they had arrived, as much as any person can be said to do when they’re supporting multiple children on a low budget and suddenly the budget has eased. Not loosened, no; the budget was still tight for years. My mother and father were cautious with money.

The house itself was no great shakes; built in the 1890s or as late as the 1910s, it shows up as one of few houses in early photos of that part of Greybull. It had a main room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom, with another two rooms added on the back and a porch on the front. Late in the game my father added an enclosed porch on the back. There was a partial concrete basement, and my dad dug a root cellar in the dirt to the north of the basement, still under the house. I don’t remember what the foundation was like, except the siding did not reach the ground. The main purpose of the concrete basement was to access the well, and hold the canning jars on shelves.

After I left home there was a drought, in an area already designated desert; my father was only able to water his extensive garden because he had his own well. He had to post a sign on the front of the house stating the presence of a well, so that passersby wouldn’t report him for watering his lawn. I don’t actually know if he ran sprinklers during that time; I do know he kept gardening up to the year they moved out of that house. He was close to 90 years old then.