My childhood home on Superior St. “behind” Lincoln School on the south side of Sault Ste. Siberia. Actually it was pretty darn shabby but when you are a toddler, you don’t really notice.

Actually I don’t remember noticing it that much even as a teenager. I had friends who lived in much fancier homes but I also had friends living in shabbier homes. When I was a teenager, my boyfriend and I visited a friend of ours in one of the shabbier houses. Mom was intensely curious about the interior of that house. The kids were highly intelligent (my mom was a high school teacher) but she sensed some family dysfunction. I thought about it for a minute and said, “Well, I wouldn’t want to walk around barefoot in there.” We could definitely walk barefoot in our shabby little bungalow and she never forgot that (LOL). (Dysfunction? We won’t talk about the FIVE-year-old who asked his great-uncle babysitter for a beer TWICE and was granted one each time. We left before he finished the second so who knows how many he had that night.)

That’s meeee on the step stool, eating breakfast in my footie pajamas with what I think are various “eat your breakfast” talismans surrounding me. Looking to my right is Gertrude’s broom closet, the one with the cartoon that I wrote about yesterday. I VAGUELY remember that stove. Actually I better remember when it was replaced. Our new stove had a light that proclaimed “Units” when any of the burners or the oven was left on. The precursor to my Gertrude. When “Units” was on, I would always yell, “Mom, units is on!”

The shabbiness was tolerable but a couple other things were not so much. That house had one of those old “octopus” oil furnaces. It began malfunctioning at some point, so we replaced it with a new gas furnace a couple years before “we” (aka the parents) moved. Also, the south side of Sault Ste. Siberia was basically a swamp and there were a few times the basement filled with a foot of water or so.

My local grandparents lived in a much fancier house but the bedrooms and the only bathroom were on the second floor. At some point, the family moved them into my piano teacher’s single story house (they had moved). After the grandparents died, my parents bought that house from the fam and moved there. I was in college by then.

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