Friday Five: Location Location Location

I'm hosting the Rev Gal Blog Pals Friday Five today.

My daughter, her husband, and their toddler, Trinity Ann, are moving from Minneapolis, Minnesota to our place. It's a long story, but the short version is that they will be loading a Ryder truck on Saturday, and on Sunday afternoon we will unload it into a storage unit in our town. They will move themselves, their two cats and their BIG dog into our place. Yes, there will be issues, but this Friday Five isn't really about that. (Prayers for jobs for them and patience for all of us are most welcome, however.) This post is about locations. My husband has lived at 64 addresses in his life so far (16 with me) and he suggested the topic since we have moving trucks on our minds. Therefore, tell us about the five favorite places you have lived in your lifetime. What did you like? What kind of place was it? Anything special happen there?

1. "The El Dorado house, Pacoima, CA." That was the name of our street, and it is the first house I remember. It was an old house but it was on a double lot, so the yard was enormous to the child me. We had about a dozen olive trees, a long driveway, a big palm in the front. I used to pull on the long palm fronds and watch them spring upward. To me they looked like horses tossing their manes in the wind. I had many friends, my family was still intact, we had dogs, cats, birds, fish...it was not a nice house, but I was a kid and didn't really care about that. The ice cream man came by at least once a week in his little truck with bells, I could climb olive trees, I played Robin Hood and Maid Marian, cowboys and Indians, pirates...we were the only family on the block without a television. That was probably a good thing.

2. "The house on Woodman Street, Mission Hills, CA." Our family moved from a "rough" neighborhood into one about five miles away--to what seemed to me then like a very fancy house. I was eleven. The house had a beautiful yard with many kinds of flowers, a big walnut tree in the front yard, a hugh fireplace, a "sunken" living room, and three roomy bedrooms. I had a room of my own, at last! I lived there when I met my husband-to-be, we kissed for the first time on the back patio of that house, I cooked spaghetti for our friends, we had wonderful times there. There were also horrible things that happened when I lived in that lovely house, but I don't associate them with the house like I do the good things.

3. "The apartment on Pacific Ave." This was the first place Ken and I lived in our married life. It was a small apartment in Oceanside, California. Ken was in the USMC and was stationeed at Camp Pendleton. We did not live there long. We moved into (awful) base housing after about four months in the apartment. But I recall the fun of decorating my first place, making it homey with free things gleaned from Good Will stores. The apartment was one block from the beach! Imagine! I didn't know it till after we moved to base housing, but I probably conceived my daughter there.

4. "Tarawa Terrace, Jacksonville, NC, near Camp Lejeune." This was another awful base housing unit. But I met Iro there, a Greek neighbor who taught me many things, I enjoyed my little baby daughter, I planted flowers, and I grew as a person, a wife, a mom. It has good associations in my heart.

5. "Our Trinity Trailer, Ellendale, ND." This was a campus mobile home, buffeted by the icy North Dakota winds. Our back door had ice on the inside during the winter, the bedrooms were tiny, the colors were 70s ugly. But our daughter Kris, a first-grader then, and our new little guy, Josh, loved it there. They were free to safely roam the fields, the town, the campus. We had friends who were like family, we loved learning and growing. I fought with my calling there, and I lost the battle. North Dakota is not a place I want to ever live in again, but those days in the "married housing trailers," marvelling at the wonderful sky, northern lights, sparkling snow, the fields of sunflowers, the horrific winds were good. I did not know it at the time. I was trying to be a mommy, an employee, and a good student all at the same time. I had a meltdown about mid term each year. Looking back, it was one of the most wonderful times of our lives. Our children were a joy, and we were very naive. Hopeful, naive, idealistic.