Tag Archives: Hometown

Home Ownership: The American Dream?

For Hubby, me and our newborn daughter, our rental house proved a sanctuary.

Apartments worked for Hubby and me — until a percussion major moved upstairs. Then, upon expecting our first child, we learned our complex was a drug trafficking center.

We rented a house.

The only upstairs residents were squirrels. They pattered across the roof, but none sold drugs or played xylophones.

We possessed three whole bedrooms and a garage. No more scraping ice off car windows. Hubby and I began to succumb to the American Dream. …

However, the driveway didn’t shovel itself. Our house boasted a real yard — whose grass never stopped growing. Flowers I planted attracted real weeds. We purchased a shovel, mower and garden tools. Lawn chairs. And …

The infinite to-buy list should have warned us about home ownership.

But tired of paying rent, I longed to choose the colors of walls and carpet. Bang nails to hang pictures without asking permission.

Our younger daughter welcomed her new brother to the little ranch we built. Thank goodness the water and sewer system had been connected!

So, we built a little ranch in a new addition … where roads hadn’t been completed. Also, water and sewage hadn’t yet been connected to the town’s system. During that inflationary era, the special 12 percent mortgage seemed cheap, compared to an earlier 21.5 percent prime rate.

We brought two newborns to that ranch. Mysterious stains marred my carefully chosen colors. I spent years watering grass and breastfeeding babies. Neither was ever satisfied. I also discovered I wasn’t handy. If I banged a nail into one wall, a gaping hole appeared in the opposite one.

The American Dream?

Before we knew it, the toddler had a prom date.

One other house we owned ate water heaters and softeners. Another featured a pillow-soft porch roof, as well as a toilet that randomly ran over and soaked anyone playing Ping-Pong in the basement.

We occasionally considered living in a grass hut in Bongo Bongo.

Still, Hubby and I have called all three houses “home.”

Home, where our babies took first, shaky steps. Where they learned to watch for traffic as they walked to school. Home, where we took prom and graduation pictures. Home, where they and their children now come for holidays.

Home is the only place where Hubby and I can put feet on the furniture. Where we can blow up and make up. Bake brownies, eating them all without anyone judging.

Our American Dream is no HGTV superstar, but at this address, we can be us.

At home.

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: What home-owning adventures have you experienced?

OMG, It’s Monday! Prayer: Beyond Blessed

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O Lord, sometimes, book signings can be a real bust. But OMG, what joy to share one with special writing friends and many dear hometown readers. Despite the first season’s snow, they dragged out of warm beds on a cold Saturday morning and blessed us with their presence!

Author Dan Fuller featured his coming-of-age western, *A Rifle by the Door*. I shared my new Christmas cozy mystery, *Deck the Hearse*.

Fellow writer Jody Stinson helped carry heavy boxes of books and kept things moving. What a friend!

This Is MY Hometown?

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If you still reside in your hometown, changes might raise your eyebrows and ire. Soon, though, surprises make themselves at home, part of everyday experience.

Hubby (top row center) and I (bottom row middle) were high school sweethearts.

Visiting a distant hometown, however, shifts one’s universe. A once-busy shopping center has been conquered by Bennie the Bomb Fireworks. Why did town fathers allow trees to grow so big? That implies we’ve added rings to our girth, too.

My husband and I grew up in the same city, but our parents — and we — moved decades ago.

Now, new roads have sprouted like kudzu vines.

We’re lost.

Though I can’t find our motel, I’ve located the street where I failed my driving test. I remind Hubby that I’ve never received a traffic ticket, whereas I can point to the stoplight he ran to earn one.

Hubby and I recall our accidents: mine, near the high school, watched by God and everybody; his, when a coal truck smacked his Opel two weeks before our wedding.

We cruise past former homes.

“They cut down my favorite tree!” I complain. Without my permission, yet.

“Our yard’s taken over by creepy little gnomes,” Hubby rants. “They’re by my room!”

Columbus North High School entrance, Columbus, Indiana.

We tour our old high school. Star Wars technology prevails, even in drinking fountains. The school now boasts a food court instead of a cafeteria. Too many choices! A few familiar areas comfort us. We recognize the classroom where we counted red-eyed and white-eyed fruit flies for our deep, dark genetics project. His locker’s still nearby — next to my ex-boyfriend’s. A nice reminder of how lucky Hubby is to have reversed the situation.

We visit the ice cream parlor where not only I, but my mother ate hot fudge sundaes after school. The store where Hubby rented prom and wedding tuxes. The restaurant where I, wearing the world’s ugliest uniform, served customers for a dollar an hour. The pre-McDonald’s fast-food restaurant where Hubby donned a folded paper hat and baggy uniform pants five inches too short.

Our 1975 wedding in East Columbus United Methodist Church.

We visit childhood churches that nurtured our faith in Christ. We reminisce about our wedding.

Finishing the tour, we agree: Our hometown is where we live now, not where we resided 50 years ago. However, this place continues to impact us. Nothing will change that.

Not even a gnome invasion.

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Have you visited your hometown recently?

Cruising

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Even before spring, desperate parents, after excessive winter togetherness, pay their teens to cruise. Their alien music blares through wide-open windows, loud enough for Martian counterparts to keep the beat.

But we did it, too, right? Although when I cruised, gas cost 30.9 cents per gallon.

In my hometown, puberty’s onset compelled us to cruise Jerry’s Drive-In. We parked outside, as only squares ate inside. My girlfriends and I feared if we darkened the restaurant’s door, Percy Faith and his orchestra (Jerry’s Muzak^®) would scar us for life.

My cruel parents once dragged me inside and made me sit by the window. I slid down into the booth and covered my head with a menu. Finally, I escaped to the restroom, but Mom followed.

She even talked to me. “Are you sick?”

Didn’t she know a Popular Person might be concealed in a stall, listening?

Afterward, on Saturday nights, I retreated to the second-coolest A&W — which tied with Jerry’s if your steady worked there. Fortunately, I was dating a cook. Sometimes, he came outside in all his A&W glory (apron, little folded hat) to wow me and my friends.

When we split, though, my A&W status plummeted. I returned to Jerry’s.

I’d noticed a tall, shy guy in my biology class, so my friend, Celia, and I officially added his house to weekend cruises. I’d perfected my slink-down technique: I could ride on the car’s floor an entire evening, yet record my targets like a satellite camera. Golf-green grass surrounded my guy’s house. Symmetrical evergreens. It was located near the A&W, so we also could zoom past and spy on my ex.

Once, when I drove past my crush’s house in my parents’ uncool station wagon, Celia hung out the window and screamed, “Steeeeeevie, baby, we looooove you!”

I peeled out, chastising Celia for endangering my fragile status with my new Numero Uno and his parents, who probably had been waxing their driveway.

However, no damage was done to my relationship with the sweet guy who made biology lab fruit flies so fascinating. Soon, he and I did a little cruising too.

“Want to go to the A&W?” my future husband asked as we pulled out of his driveway.

“I’d love it.”

And I did.

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Where did you cruise as a teen?

OMG, It’s Monday! Prayer: 60 Years? Seriously?

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Lord, how can a person get lost in her hometown? Yet You helped me find and feast on lasagna with these friends with whom I once read Dick and Jane books. Played jacks and hopscotch at recess. Graduated from high school. OMG, what a fun evening You gave us — together again!