This was the shabby little bungalow I grew up in, not to be confused with the shabby little ranch/ticky-tacky house of my adulthood. My childhood bedroom is inside the window to the left.

Behind me is Lincoln School and its vast playground, at least it seemed like it was vast back then. I used to Red Queen over there every morning. Can anybody guess what that means? 😉

My house was a lot shabbier back then, for one thing the living room and front entrance have been expanded somehow. I can’t envision what it looks like inside now.

I didn’t really notice our house’s shabbiness when I was a kid, I guess because although we were FAR from wealthy, we always had more than enough to eat, not to mention clothing, working utilities, and an automobile (or two or three in later years) and all the other things we all need to live in this society. And we had the cabin…

My grandparents and local aunt and uncle had nicer, bigger houses but I never felt envious about that. I was much more interested in the little nooks and crannies in those houses when we visited them. A breakfast nook in my aunt and uncle’s. The walk-through pantry in my grandma’s. Not that you could ever WALK THROUGH that pantry because I think the door to the hallway was blocked or locked or whatever. At the end of the day, I loved my cute little bedroom in our shabby little house.

It’s all relative. One time one of the Lesk (intentionally misspelled) kiddos from further up Superior where the houses got even shabbier than ours got a gander of our crappy little living room with its holey carpet and cat-clawed couch and exclaimed, “Finnelsons is rich!” The Commander was dumbfounded. Finnelson is how a lot of local folks mispronounced our name. I could never “unnerstand” [snort] this. My name was so easy to spell. It was three words. Fin. Lay. Son. How hard was that?

But what The Comm was dumbfounded about was his opinion of our house. We were all accustomed to the mispronunciation. In those days there were a lot of illiterate folk around town. I think that has improved although I don’t think the poverty rate has although it may have shifted populations a bit. If a kid thought our shabby living room indicated we were rich, I can’t think what he might have been living in. Except I kinda do. A whole bunch of kids in a small, squalid house. I dunno what happened to all of those kids but I’m pretty sure some of them became pretty darn successful and live in much fancier houses than mine. I followed my parents’ modus operandi. Don’t spend more than you earn.

Oh, those snowbanks? I used to walk to school on top of those. (When I wasn’t Red Queening!)

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