The Crazy House

Straight out of the camera of my new friend, these are two gorgeous shots of the place I will always call home. Although I lived there only seven years, they were my most formative and impressionable. I was born when my parents lived in Lexington, but just before I started first grade we moved into this house in Georgetown.

It wasn't always this stately and beautiful. In fact, I remember that when we first moved in I secretly thought of it as the Crazy House. It was like nothing I had ever seen before.

The previous owner was what my parents politely referred to as "interesting" or "inventive" when my sister and I were around. I suspect they used more colorful language when we weren't. He had been a deaf man and something of an inventor perhaps. A few of his creations were even practical. The rest? Not so much. Every bathroom in the house was rigged with a small window panel built into the wall. Beneath the colored glass there was a small lightbulb. If the light bulb was on it meant that the bathroom was occupied since knocking and waiting for a reply would have been useless for someone who couldn't hear.

Some of his innovations were seriously strange. Running through the middle of the first floor was a hallway full of doors – ten to be exact. Some led to closets or the basement. But one door opened into a bathtub. There was not a single inch of space with the exception of a closet full of tub! In order to actually use it for its intended purpose of bathing you would have to completely disrobe in the middle of the hallway. . . not very practical or relaxing. Eventually my sister and I claimed it as a play area and spent hours with our dolls and stuffed animals, playing in a cramped, yellow bathtub in a closet. And to my knowledge, in the seven years we lived there not a single cleansing soak happened in that closet. {I wonder if it's still there??}

The front yard in these pictures looks beautiful now but when we first moved in it was also seriously odd. There was a formal, circular garden framed in boxwoods grown out of control and large, overgrown, unkempt flower beds. In the center of the garden was a fountain that had certainly seen better days. Perhaps even days when it might have actually worked. But the craziest thing I had ever seen in my life was between the garden and the house – a cemetery monument about four feet high marking the grave of the previous owner's dog. It had a bronze plaque and the whole nine yards memorializing his faithful companion. (For the life of me I can't remember the dog's name now!) Like everything else that was so unconventional in this house, my sister and I converted it for our own purposes. It made a perfect pitcher's mound for our whiffle ball games! {And if you got the whiffle ball onto the roof, it was an automatic home run!}

My room growing up was the one right off the carport in the first photo. I loved the huge windows looking out over the roof. The mourning doves congregated there and awoke me on summer mornings with their cries. I always wanted to climb out my windows and sit out there with the doves but I was too shy a kid to even try.

My sister's room was on the opposite side of the house. Her windows overlooked the swimming pool. {The one where she almost drowned, but that's another story.} We used to imagine having a slide that went from her windows directly into the water. It sounded like so much fun at the time but I doubt we'd would have had the courage to try! I remember looking longingly out those windows when my parents had an adult party and we were threatened with promises of pain not to leave that room until the party was over. My mom brought us fancy food and we entertained ourselves by watching some adults do things that children probably shouldn't witness from upstairs windows. {I also remember that we completely trashed the room – took the mattresses and box springs off the frames, threw our toys all over the place – knowing we wouldn't get in trouble since my mother felt bad that we were locked away for so many hours.}

The happiest memories of my life are in this house. Memories that were formed well before religion, dogma and inflexibility became the standards. Times that were fun, relaxed and unclenched.

:: my dad teaching me to play basketball in the driveway

:: my mother doing cartwheels in the front yard

:: keeping chickens in a coop off the garage (that looks like it's gone now)

:: planting our live Christmas tree at the front of the lot near the road one year

:: playing in the huge sycamore tree and pretending it was a spaceship

:: my dad taking the extra time to mow a path through the tall grass surrounding the huge backyard for our very own bike path

:: my dad, while clearing the overgrown side yard with a chain saw, cut down a tree that fell on my sister while she was riding her bike

:: my sister and I pushing the riding lawn mower up the hill in the driveway and rolling it back down into the garage, over and over again. until one particular day, when we missed and hit the garage door. we bent the frame of the mower. the parents were not impressed.

:: learning to cook in the huge kitchen with the fieldstone fireplace and the rocking chair with the wide, black bottom

:: our 15' Christmas trees, always in the formal entry way at the front door. this photo is from about 1975 and it's all the cousins on my dad's side of the family in descending order. that's me at the top with my sister Cindy next, then Sally, Tracy, Kim, Tricia, Carrie and Melissa. (Jamie wasn't here yet!)

:: being taught to sew in the tiny room with the miniature door where my mother's sewing machine was kept

:: standing at the end of the long driveway, trying not to cry, waiting for the school bus on my first day of first grade at Great Crossing Elementary School

I loved the Crazy House. I still do. When anyone asks, "Where are you from?" this is the place that frames and anchors my childhood. And it will always be my home.

*thank you to Aunt Sharon for sending me the pic from Christmas! I don't have any pictures from my childhood.