We Really Needed to Move

I loved the little house we rented from mom and dad.  It was old, cute, and eccentric. The doorknobs were glass and the floor was hardwood, but we had to replace it twice during the six years we lived there due to termites.  There was a big rock fireplace in the front room, but it mostly let cold air in through it's chimney.  It had a heavy mantle above it,  perfect for holding candles and pine boughs, but it was made out of cement so I couldn't drive nails in to hang my Christmas stockings on.  The front room ceiling was high and beamed, but even with a broom I couldn't reach it to knock down spiderwebs.  The walls were smooth plaster, but they had been painted and papered so many times it took days to strip them before I could paint them my way.  The architecture was quaint, but it was hard to squeeze our family of five into the two tiny bedrooms and one very small bath, so after living there for six years I was ready for a new house.  About that time dad bought some acreage out in Gilbert, and began thinking about selling the rental house anyway.

I'd had a ball painting that old house.  I'd painted Cookie Monster, Ernie, and Big Bird in the kids bedroom.  Then I tried my hand at a dragon and The Count in the back play room.  In my bedroom I experimented with Lilly of the valley, roses, and all kinds of stencils, but the best part of do-it-yourself decorating was being able to paint over my trials when I was done.  I never could come up with a design for those walls that satisfied me.

The front window was paned, and it looked beautiful at Christmas when I painted it with snowflakes and poinsettias, but the calking around each piece of glass continually chipped out, letting the weather in.  The yard was amazing!  It was full of mature trees and bushes, and the irrigated lawn was plush and green, but I could never get our ancient lawn mower to start so I usually cut the whole thing with the weed eater, which made gave me a cramp in my back and left a red burn on my arm because it got so hot.

The worst thing about that house was the heating and cooling.  It had a gas wall furnace as well as the fireplace, but I was afraid of explosions or carbon-monoxide poisoning, so we rarely used it.  There was a big square hole cut in the back wall with an ancient evaporative cooler mounted behind it, but it mostly spit water into the room and increased the humidity to a point where I felt like I was living in a sauna without hardly lowering the temperature at all.  By August of our sixth year I  was ready to trade all the charms of that old house for a new, boring, modern home.  Plus, I discovered I was expecting our fourth child, and we really needed at least two kids rooms.

We looked at all kinds of house and finally found a new subdivision south of town where they were building homes we could afford.  We drove out to look at the area and fell in love.  It was just south of the Freeway, in a kind of no-mans-land where our address would be Mesa but the school district was Gilbert.  Years earlier I had driven down the main street of Gilbert and decided I would never want to live there, but it had changed since then.  By this time Mesa and Gilbert had grown so much you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. 

We signed papers the same week Linnea began Kindergarten.  Since it would take about four months to build our house she started in the same school where I went to Kindergarten, but we planned to move her to Gilbert at the beginning of January.  I was glad, because her first day of school didn't go too well. 

Linnea came home that first day disgusted!  Her teacher had paired all the kids up with walking buddies, and she had put Linnea with a boy!  "I don't want to have a boy friend!" she complained when I finally got her to tell me about her first day.  "My walking buddy got out of line and I had to hold his hand, so I got out of line too. Then the teacher yelled at us and said we lost five minutes of playing time outside!   But it didn't matter," she added triumphantly, "because it was so hot nobody got to have recess!"  She sure was growing up.

Holly and Russell were getting older, too.  One day while they were playing at the playground across the street from their grandma's house Holly's foot slipped off the bars of a big (it was 15 feet tall) slippery slide.  She couldn't climb back on, but instead of falling she held onto the ladder while Linnea and her cousin ran all the way home and got their uncle to come help.  Holly was a mighty brave little girl, and stubborn.

Russell was surrounded by girls all the time.  Not only did he have two big sisters, he also had to put up with the girls I babysat, too.  Russell was good about being bossed around by girls, but he sure did like it when he got to play with his boy cousins.  He was almost three years old by this time, and the best part of moving to a new house meant he wouldn't have to share a room with his sisters any more.