Monday, September 03, 2007

My Summer Home

This house looks right out of "The Little House On The Prairie" doesn't it? This is where my grandfather lived when I was growing up on the farm. Just about 4.5 miles out of Ava, Mo in the middle of nowhere. His house had running water (finally) and what we would call electricity. The wood stove provided the heat and the tin roof provided quite the treat in the summer (not). While looking at the picture, to your right would be the outhouse, to your left would be the spring fed cellar. Before you could step in the outhouse, you had to pepper the walls and roof with rocks to scare out the animals that could make your "going" experience very interesting. Behind you would be the swimming pond, always cold and a very inhospitible place to swim especially when the water moccasins wanted to cool off. They would literally look you in the eye when you came up for air. Scary ass shit. We didn't care. This is the house that held great carefree memories of riding bikes or horses and literally being lost in the woods for hours. In May, my cousin Jim would visit from the Quad Cities and we would create the greatest havoc ever imagined(it was to us, anyway). We would spend Sunday afternoons watching Cardinal baseball (that was the ONLY time you got a game on local TV back then). After the game, we would watch some movie that had been shown a hundred times before. It didn't matter because during that movie was when Grandpa Mac would dish out some ice cream. He would take a gallon carton, cut it half and give half to us. We had to eat it right out of the carton and quickly enough so it didn't melt while all the while he would cuss up a blue streak at his percieved lack of acting ability being currently dislayed on that snow filled screen. He actually made up cuss words. August was hard, Jim would leave to go back home and I would have to get used to being alone again. I hated August, maybe still do. There really wasn't much to this place and my kids still don't understand how life could be so hard but yet so full of fun. It's hard to explain how little we had and how much we did with it.

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