Oh, the Places I have Lived ! - Part 6

In an elevator in some place in Connecticut once, my mom was asked where we had moved from. She knew the man was asking about her Southern accent, but with a twinkle in her eye, she responded, “New Hampshire.”

 

“No you didn’t,” the man, surprised, argued.

 

“Well,” Mom admitted, “southernNew Hampshire.”

 

Yes, the man was very confused although my mom’s answer was the gospel truth. We did move to Connecticut from southern New Hampshire. He simply wasn’t asking the right question. And after a laugh, my mom told him she was from Tennessee. And the man’s next question?

 

“Oh! Did you know Elvis?”

 

Unfortunately, no, my mother never met Elvis.

 

People who have never lived in New England tend to group those six little states together but if you live up there and spend any amount of time in any of them you realize that while they have similarities, they are also very different. By the time we moved in Connecticut the summer I was eleven, I had come to an understanding with New Englanders and was more open to accepting Connecticut as a home than I had been New Hampshire. Combining that with the impressionable ages of what is now referred to as “tweens” and living there for a record-breaking three years and one month…well, I really loved Connecticut. Now, I probably wouldn’t live there. Not that I could ever afford it anyway.

 

My dad, while on business trips, found us a rental house to live in. He came home quite excited about it. It had a birch tree in the front, a huge field on the side we could play it, set on top of a hill, multiple trees in the back, and the view! Well, the view was to die for. 

 

“How many bedrooms?” Mom asked.

 

“Um, four…I think. The view, Pat! You can see rolling hills, and…”

 

“How many bathrooms?”

 

“Um, one and half, I believe. And there are orchards on those hills!”

 

“Does it have a kitchen?”

 

Of course it had a kitchen, but one without an oven. My dad could describe so little about the house itself my mom had a nightmare about it: there was a house with a kitchen, but it had holes in all the walls so she could look out at the view.

 

And the view was quite amazing. Visitors at our house took pictures of it! Rolling hills, orchards, beautiful fall foliage. The yard was to die for as far we kids were concerned: a hill to sled down, a field to play in, a driveway to ride bikes on, and trees to climb and have all kinds of adventures in. If the setting is what makes a house then we had it all.

 

But the house itself was a little odd in some ways. Actually, it was an old farmhouse built around the time of the turn of the 20^thCentury. We had picked up from various people in the area that it had once owned practically all the land you can see from the house and was quite a farming operation. And it had been a really nice house: well built with four bedrooms upstairs all around a central hall area, a spacious living room and dining area, a very large staircase, and a good kitchen although it needed some work. Even the basement was spacious and mostly dry. A screened in porch with three sets of French doors leading out to it made really easy for the movers to move us in and out. It also made a great butterfly house one summer for Katey who would grab her net and dash out of the house whenever a butterfly flew by a window. Between those and the caterpillars she caught and let loose in the porch, it was the biggest science project she ever conducted. We had a great time living there.

 

But the house was backwards, in that the front did not actually face the road it was on. The screened porch faced the road and almost looked like the front of the house, but once you followed the drive around to the back, you realized from the pillars holding up a balcony in great need of repair above a porch that you were now facing the front. It was also a bizarre yellow color and what shutters were still in place were a terrible avocado green. The owner paid his 19-year-old son and a friend to paint it one summer. I think the intention was to make it more cream like, but all the shutters were never put back up and they painted the brick chimney (except a good portion around the wires coming into the house) which made it look tacky. A job that took those two lazy kids weeks to complete.

If you google the house today and look at it in streetview, you can see it is now a pleasant gray and someone has turned the screened porch into a “front porch”, trimmed the windows in white and all of the shutters – now black – are in place. It makes me curious of what the real front now looks like and if someone has put some real thought and work into creating the inside into something really nice. But, regardless, I have a lot of fond memories of that house in Wallingford, Connecticut.