Tobacco Road

I didn't crop or do anything to dress up this photo because I wanted you to see this place as it is.  It is the home I grew up in and left when I was 13...forty-eight years ago.  My mom calls it Tobacco Road, taken from an old movie where the houses were nothing but run down shacks.

The section of the house where the three windows are located across the front didn't exist when we lived there.  That part was the big porch!  If I remember correctly, at one point it had a rickety, old rocking chair on it.  The floor boards were about ready to collapse.  I'm not sure we were even allowed to go up there.  There was a front door coming in from that porch but we couldn't use it.  It  didn't work.

But look at the size of that yard.  Lots of baseball was played there.  So much so that a diamond was worn out in the grass.  There had been four maple trees that my parents planted as saplings in each corner.  The last time I saw them they were enormous.  I blipped it once before .  But today all we saw was piles of firewood and stumps.  But the giant apple tree we climbed in is still there.

It had two bedrooms.  Of course, mom and dad used one.  Andy and Frank had bunk beds and I had  a single in the other.  I can picture the one dresser and the window seat that opened up and stored all sorts of blankets and such.  There was a small walk-in closet in which we used to hide and play under the hanging clothes.

When John was born, six  years after Frank, he slept in a crib in my parents room until he got too big for that.  Then it was four of us in the second.  He in a cot which was squeezed in among us.

In 1967, my parents, moved us into our newly built four-bedroom house.  At 13, I finally broke free of my three brothers and got my very own room.  It was every girl's dream fulfilled.

My dad and mom made it happen for their family and they were proud.

We were no longer living on Tobacco Road.