My parents’ house
My parents tried their best to buy nothing on credit. I don’t know if they had a house mortgage; I’m guessing probably yes, because they owned their home in Wyoming by the time they sold it, as far as I know. But they were so Scotch that they intentionally bought this antique fixer-upper with only two bedrooms and an enclosed porch, and fit their children into it like puzzle pieces. I was a toddler when they moved in, the sixth child; my little sister was born three years after me. We girls, with our eldest sister, had the best bedroom, right next to the furnace and right next to the bathroom and dining room. Our four brothers, ages 8 and up when they moved in, slept on two sets of bunkbeds in the tiny enclosed porch with a tiny closet and its own gas heater built into one wall. This porch room had windows on two sides and the house entrance on the third side, closed off to make a tiny entrance space before their bedroom door. It had no proper foundation, and over time sank into the ground until the floor sloped considerably. After their boys moved out, my father leveled the floor of that room and my eldest brother repainted it. I came back to a different space when I returned from college. By that time my little sister was used to having her own space and wouldn’t let me move back into our shared bedroom. I didn’t care; I was engaged to be married.
The living room was the main room in the house. It had space for two couches, a wood stove for heat, the large dining table, a piano, bookshelves, two desks, and a floor furnace. The floor furnace used natural gas to heat the air which came up from a large rectangular grate in the living room floor. As a small child I unthinkingly stood on it while my brothers looked on, laughing. It burned a waffle pattern on my feet.
The two couches were both hide-a-beds. I remember when both were occupied we had to crawl across them to get to the front door. My older siblings and their spouses would sleep there as visiting adults.
When the church was renovated, my dad kept two light blue hollow wooden doors, took the hardware off, and used them as tables, laying one on each couch with wooden children’s size chairs to prop the front edges. My parents did genealogy most Sundays, spreading wide pedigree charts and family group records on those large doors. My sister and I got very good at making popcorn to go with hot chocolate for dinner those nights.
