A house is a house for me

The first house I remember living in was in Ridgefield, Connecticut.  I was around 4 years old and lived there with my sister, mom and dad.  The smell of an autumn leaf pile will bring me right back there.  We had the most enormous leaf piles in the world.  I remember the sound that my grandmother's heavy clip-on earrings made when they clacked together from where they were clipped to my stuffed brown dog, Gog, who wore them happily.  Gog was a plain dog who liked to dress up when Grandma came to town from Boston where she lived.  I suppose that, being the soulful child I was that I named him partway between God and dog, which is a pretty good name for most any of the canine types.

After Ridgefield we moved to North Kingstown Rhode Island where I spent my early adolescence.  1970 to 1977.  It was an awkward fashion time for me, big glasses, big limbs, shiny braces.  I had cute friends and I wanted so badly to be cute but never quite attained that.  Marsha Matthews was cute.  She was the first girl I knew who spoke about french kissing behind the library stacks in our open-concept school.  Our house in Rhode Island was, from my memory, a huge center stairway colonial with a vast back yard suitable for rabbit hutches, gymnastics shows and, way up on the hill, my mother's vegetable garden.  I've driven by it since, and wasn't all that surprised to see that it's gotten significantly smaller over the years.  We lived nearby, but not in, the neighboring development that contained hundreds of houses.  My best friend lived in that development but we were always a little on the outside.  At the farthest border of the neighborhood I could still hear the supper bell that my mom embarrassingly rang for us when it was time to come home and get washed up.  It was required for us to respond to the bell, "coming" which we grudgingly did.

In November of 1977 we moved to Woodbury Connecticut so my dad could take a job with a friend of his. To this day, at age 51 I'm not sure what type of work he did there.  I do know that there were frozen veal cutlets involved because occasionally my dad would come home with a box of frozen cutlets, like a warrior returning to camp after battle with meat for the winter.  The job only lasted for 8 months.  8 months of my sophomore year.  I briefly dated a guy named Monty who reminded me of a character from Chariots of Fire, the lanky, laid-back, likely always a little under the influence of something blonde runner.  When I say we dated I mean that I think we kissed once and I rebuffed his attempts to get into my bra, the cups of which were audaciously and necessarily supplemented with cotton balls.  Our house in Woodbury was on top of Upper Grassy Hill and it was wrapped in aluminium siding.  The wind blew all the time up there and we ate a lot of frozen veal cutlets.

Woodbury led us to Tolland Connecticut where my dad got a good job as an executive in a wire manufacturing company and where I graduated from high school.  Tolland is where I started keeping journals, pages and pages of adolescent angst and passionate longing for a boyfriend to love, self-acceptance, true beauty, actual breasts and makeup kits from the back of magazines that were worth well over $50 but that you could buy for only $10.00.  We put a screened in porch on the back of our Tolland house, smaller than the one we had built on the back of our North Kingstown house, but adequate for our purposes.  I suppose that having a screened in porch was a small concession for my mom who stalwartly packed our things each time and unpacked our things in a different house, always making it our home.  My sister and future brother-in-law announced their engagement on that screened in porch.  My grandfather was living with us at the time and I'm not sure he really understood what was happening.  Too many people speaking all at once.

I'm going to have to pick up this thread of writing later because I don't want to be late for noon yoga.  I have a chill after my trail run this morning and am looking forward to the 106 degree studio.  Before I go, I'll list the rest of the places I've lived:

Mount Carmel Ave, Hamden, Connecticut, the basement apartment I rented in college
108 Riverside Drive, New York City
102 Whapley Road, Glastonbury, Connecticut
45 Hudson Street, Manchester, Connecticut
Buckland Hills Drive, Manchester, Connecticut, the apartments by the mall
Otis Street, Manchester, Connecticut, the apartment in the big old mansion near Main Street
Starkweather Street, Manchester, Connecticut, the little yellow dutch colonial I bought on my own
11 Treetop Lane, Broad Brook, Connecticut, Mark's and my first home together
17 Park Place Circle, West Hartford, Connecticut, our condo which we rented out as of yesterday
3640 Silver Plume Lane, Boulder, Colorado, our rented house on Table Mesa in South Boulder from where I write at present.

...all of which has been written down to allow me to explore our next move to our next house.