It seems only fitting to take a pause in my house adventures and discuss what the Sturm family does when it doesn’t have a house to live in.
When we moved from Texas back up to New Hampshire in July of 1999, we didn’t have a place to move into. Dad had been unable to find a rental home, but he needed to start work. And his company paid to have us put up in a hotel until we did find a house. So, our stuff went into storage and we moved into two upper story rooms of a hotel in Nashua, NH. Us, a beagle, two cats, at least six kittens, and two rabbits that would have bunnies while we were there. And lest you think we were totally insane, the rabbits were kept in cages hidden under some bushes outside the hotel.
So, yes, only partially insane.
We were there for a month, enough time for those kittens to grow up and escape every time we opened the hotel room’s door. In a lot of ways, I don’t remember much about it. Except there was hardly anything on the television the first week outside coverage of the missing JFK, Jr. We learned to cook enough stuff in a coffee pot we thought about writing a book on it (noodles, corn, other vegetables). We ate at the same Chinese restaurant every weekend until they simply prepared the table in advance. And we drove each other crazy. Yeah. That would about cover it.
Our next house was located in Manchester, in a tiny slit of the town cut out between Litchfield and Londonderry. If we have a picture of it, I can’t find it. It was a decent house, but only three bedrooms. We blocked off one of the living areas with the piano and called it my parents’ bedroom, which was still wide open to the kitchen. It had a central vacuuming system which was certainly a new concept to us. I can’t say any of us were so impressed we would want one. After all, vacuuming is vacuuming. But it was on a quiet cul-de-sac in a nice neighborhood, we had good neighbors, the yard was a decent size, and we had some good times there. But we only had it for a year, which turned into 13 months, and then we found ourselves once again without a home.
This time we didn’t have anyone to pay for a hotel, so our faith was in the Lord providing a roof over our heads. First, we headed to upper peninsula Michigan. My dad and Daniel were going to a camp up there, and we went along for the ride. For one, we had no where else to go. And, two, we had already planned to meet my grandparents up there and see where my grandmother had grown up. In a town there is literally in the middle of nowhere. Aside from the fact that it had a Polish community, I’m not sure why my great-grandparents decided to make their home there. But they did, and we met the infamous Aunt Paula (who, much to my surprise, did not have the horns of a devil) and Aunt Mary, my grandmother’s two sisters who still lived on the family farm. And saw the acreage my grandmother received in her father’s will: property no one wants but she was always quite proud of. All in all, it was an experience to see a place no one ever visits and rather fun (especially watching the bear outside our cabin one night trying to open a mayonnaise jar we had thrown away). Between that and the journey back, we saw four of the five great lakes and the beautiful Thousand Island region of New York – an area I would love to visit again.
But then we were back in New Hampshire, scrambling to find a place to live. We needed to get our pets back from friends, everything except what we absolutely needed was in our van, and we managed a couple of nights in a hotel. Thankfully, our church had connections with a place called the Sarto Center. The denomination used it to house church groups that came up in the summer to help in various ways around the region. But it was October, and the owners were happy to rent out a couple of rooms for a few weeks until they had a retreat group using it. We could also use the kitchen and main room. It wasn’t a very charming place, but it was warm and dry. We moved in.
And we weren’t the only ones. Also living there was a young church planter, his wife, and their little 2-year-old from Georgia who were also looking for a place to live. We became great friends, although we may have darkened poor Brandton’s soul teaching him to play Spoons with a real deck of cards. (Like I said, they were from Georgia.) And, by a date mix-up, ended up there at the same time of the retreat we were supposed to avoid. But those ladies didn’t need all the rooms. And they didn’t mind sharing the place. In fact, we all had a great weekend retreat together! We also found our new home.
However, before everything closed on the house and the present owners could move out, we also needed to leave the Sarto Center to allow for another retreat that did need all the space. We were able to rent a couple of rooms in west New Hampshire at a tiny Bible college tucked into the Mount Monadnock region through the president who dad knew through homeschooling connections. Although we were still living with bare necessities in small spaces and getting very tired of it (and each other), it was a beautiful place to be in October! The foliage was breathtaking, the mornings cool and crisp, the walks gorgeous. And we discovered the best old used bookstore in all of New Hampshire not ten minutes down the road. (Plus the hotdog stand in the parking lot.) It we had to be homeless for one more week, it was a wonderful place to be.
And, then, my whole life changed. We moved into a house we actually owned and would stay in for EIGHT WHOLE YEARS.
A record I have yet to break…
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