NaBloPoMo Post #9: Different House?

When was the first time that you realized that your home was not like other people’s homes? (Guest Post by Catherine Gildiner, author of After the Falls)


When I was 12 years old, my family moved from Panama City, Florida to Portland. We moved into an older, but big, nice house.  In Florida, everything was cheaper - we lived in a military area and the economy there was depressed.  The house my parents bought was double the price they had sold our 3 year old house for in Florida.  Once I started making some friends, I had them come over and I would go over to their house.


One friend lived quite a distance from us, so she would ride the bus home with me and then my mom would drive her home. One time, her mother said she would pick her up on her way home.  When she arrived, she rang the bell and I let her in.  The kitchen was right by the front entry way and I introduced her to my mother while her daughter was getting her coat.

My friend's mother looked around in the entry and the kitchen area and said to my mother, "Well, it's not bad, but I would never live in a USED home."  Even at the age of 12, I knew that this woman had just ripped on my mother, my father and everything about us.  My mother smiled and was very friendly and welcoming. Luckily, they left pretty quickly.  I never invited the daughter to my house again.

My mother still remembers that comment and the woman who made it.  Even though she never said it, I think it cut her to the bone.  I always regretted having that woman come to our house.

I don't know if this is what the prompt was looking for, but when I read the question, this was the story that came to mind.

**I have skipped some prompts that don't resonate for me right now - I may go back to them, I may not.

Nostalgia - Places I've Lived

For some reason, today I was feeling nostalgic for the places I have lived. I decided to look them up on Google Earth. We don't really have any photos of where we lived before moving to Panama City, Florida except for some slides from Colorado. All the photos from Germany were stolen, so most of the places live in my mind's eye. To see the places from Google Earth is wild - very little has changed since I was living in those places. This is really more for me than anything else, so bear with me.

Aurora, Colorado - the first house I lived in on Florence Street. Crawford Elementary school, where I attended Kindergarten and 1/2 of first grade is across the street. There is also the city park a few blocks away and the medical center behind the house where I hid some of my toys thinking I would come back and get them after going to "Germany" which I didn't know was a place (I was 6).



The Amelia Earhart Hotel in Wiesbaden, Germany was the next "home" I remember. We lived there for at least a month or two while waiting for housing. Eventually, we found a place in Medenbach, Wiesbaden, Germany and lived "off the base" otherwise known as "on the economy" for the rest of the year. I am still looking for that place - I don't remember the address. I know that we lived on the second floor and there was an orchard across the weird alley that was right next to our house. The landlady's daughter was named Sabina and they spoke no English. I used to walk to the school bus stop with my sister in the dark with a flashlight there.

In the Amelia Earhart hotel, where most of the USAF families lived in the early 1970s before getting into housing, there were all kinds of strange smells. Across the street was a stand that sold the most delicious rindwurst (my mother and I loved those) and bratwurst (my father and sister loved those). We could walk across the street and get a rindwurst, brochen and a triangular paper cone filled with pomme frites (which were always superior in my mind to french fries). I understand that the AE is no longer a hotel but is still under the US Armed Forces control. I have seen several blogs and other items on the internet where people are inquiring about the stand and the hotel.

The Amelia Earhart Hotel


Currently on Google Earth - AE Hotel (not a hotel anymore)


Crestview Housing Area on Bierstadter Hohe and Plutoweg

This shows the building we lived in. There were two stairwells (I always thought there were 3) per building. These have covers over the little patio we had (we just jumped over the rail from the first floor) but we didn't have covers then. As you move up Plutoweg, the last house on the lower right hand corner of the intersection of Plutoweg and Saturnstrasse was Uncle Paul's house. He was a kindly elderly German gentleman (we lived on the edge of the housing area) who gave us fruit (He gave me my first pear to eat) when we passed by. One time he invited my friend and I in to pick some fruit and gave us a glass of fresh lemonade. He spoke little English but we took German an hour a day.





To be continued...