The second place I remember living.

[vakkotaur]

The place on Liberty street was good in some ways. It was inexpensive. It was near grandparents. Being on the second story meant the floor was warm in the winter - though it also meant the place was too hot in the summer. (Talking with my folks I found out they bought the air conditioner as it was too hot to not have one there in the summer.) It was far enough away from things that it was fairly quiet. It was close enough to things that I could walk to school. Walking to a park wasn't just too far. Nor was it too far to walk to some stores, mainly a Ben Franklin, though a trip to a grocery store meant taking the car.

But when Mrs. Knospe told us she was selling the place, we had to find a place. And there wasn't a ready place to go that would be as inexpensive. But there was the shop.

The shop, though, lacked a few things. These things were running water, internal walls, and generally anything that a made a place livable beyond walls and electricity. But the property was there and the building was there. It would have to make do, and so it did, after a bit of work.

I remember the folks discussing how to arrange things. There would still be a section was workshop, but most would be living space. The kitchen/dining room(ha!)/living room was one continuous large space. Along one wall would be three bedrooms. Measurements were made and chalk markings made on the concrete floor. Where these lines were, studs went up and cheap panelling over them for walls. The outside walls got sheet insulation if they didn't have it already. The bedroom doors were the sliding and multiple fold things you might see on a closet. An oil furnace was found and brought in, kept in the shop section and a blower arranged to blow through the doorway into the living area. Some carpet remnants were found and put to use. They really weren't much at all, but it was better than bare concrete.

I think this was done rather fast, so we could move as fast as possible. We moved in even before the well was drilled. Water was used carefully - brought in a 5 gallon container or two from my grandparents' place. We went to visit them to bathe.

Eventually the well was drilled and we did have running water. But we had no septic system. A holding tank would be a constant expense and was being avoided. The greywater from the sink and shower (a fiberglass encased unit meant to be installed so the outside parts didn't show - but it did show some and it was obvious it wasn't meant to be seen) ran out a pipe and formed a little stream or swamp. Crude and not really legal, but nobody squawked and it really didn't seem to hurt anything. The plants? They adapted. After all, we had just poured gravel and concrete where a bunch used to be, this wasn't that drastic.

But one might ask about the blackwater. There wasn't any. That problem was dealt with by a curious product named the Destroylet. It was gas-fired. Lift the lid, do what you had to, lower the lid, and a flame roared for a few minutes, incinerating. It had its own chimney (and blower) and when the wind was wrong and you were outside you knew it had been used. It was used only as much as it had to be. Being out in the woods and away from possible onlookers, well, there was no great problem with watering the plants, so to speak.

The air conditioner came with us, which was nice in the summer. For the winter my father found a thick tank from some place and with some cutting and welding made a wood stove out of it. We used mainly wood heat. There was gas for the water heater, and oil for backup non-wood heat. The wood stove was also just inside the shop area and had the blower aimed into the living area. There was a doorway there, but no door. The only thing there would eventually be a wooden folding gate (of the type not seen much anymore due to concern about toddlers getting caught in them) to keep a dog on one side or the other.

Like the place on Liberty street, it wasn't much, but it would do. There wasn't much room in the bedrooms, the kitchen space was just adequate I think, and the living room was large as it was the main space used. The shop area eventually got crowded but then it wasn't expected that it would be only part of the building.

The building was not on the center of the property, so there was plenty of room to one side on that acre. A path was soon worn across the acre. This path led from the house, such as it was, to the vegetable garden and a platform a few feet off the ground. It was meant to be a playhouse but I don't think it ever had any walls to speak of. being up off the ground meant it worked as a replacement for a treehouse without needing a tree. Since all the trees were poplar (not very strong) this was a very reasonable thing.

There were also raspberry bushes. These were nice as they didn't really need any care, we just let them be and picked raspberries when we could. And where we could. The bushes were thick and if you've never encountered a raspberry bush I recommend protective clothing. The branches are a spiky and having then brushing against the skin is, at best, unpleasant.

Almost everything now meant a trip by car. The neighbors, the ones with kids near my age anyway, were about a quarter or half mile away which was within walking and bicycling distance. Fortunately there wasn't much traffic on highway G so that wasn't bad. There was bit of a hill to the west which blocked the lights from Merrill and to the south there was a glow from Wausau at night but it wasn't too bad. The sky was properly dark at night. This helped, or maybe triggered, an interest in astronomy.

I think my father bought a cheap snow blower to deal with the driveway. There was no lawnmower and there really was no lawn. We just let stuff grow as it always had, except for the path and driveway. Every once in a way one old timer who had the field across the road would bring in his lawnmower for repair and then when he got it going again my father would mow a little bit around the driveway.

I don't recall seeing rabbits or deer in the area, but that doesn't mean there was no wildlife around. One year there was a killdeer that made a nest in the driveway. The folks carefully parked on the other side of the driveway and let the bird nest be. Well, it wasn't completely undisturbed. Once in a while we'd look at the nest or eggs, never touching as I recall, as the bird would do a broken wing routine a few feet away to try to lure us away from the nest. This was before we had a dog, of course. Also there was a year when it seemed there were snakes under every rock. These were harmless grass or garter snakes. My sister and I would pick up what we could and see what was under it.

Not quite behind the house was a rock pile. This became a playground. Some rocks would, to a child's imagination, look enough like something to be that thing. Smaller stones and pebbles could make marks on bigger rocks for simple drawing. And the rocks were interesting by themselves, the mica in granite catching the the sun and sparkling. The rock pile also held in place a metal pole, atop which was a TV antenna. We could still get all three networks on four stations, and later PBS as well on the new UHF station in Wausau. I remember the TV there was a Sylvania and it showed red well. It was a red red, not an orange pretending to be red which I saw some places.

That TV gave out just around the time the Viking landers reached Mars. For a while we had a black and white set, just as the news would have things like, "And you can see in these color pictures of surface of Mars..." It was very frustrating to me. I was surprised when I found out later that my grandparents (still raising a couple of my aunts) hadn't had color at all until they moved into town. Eventually we did get another color set. It was rescued from the scrapheap at an alleged repair shop and then properly repaired. It seemed not to show red reds, alas.

My memories of the place on G are rather haphazard. Many, about the place itself, or perhaps the events in and around it, are good. A few are bad - these mainly have to do with school and would likely be the same if we'd not had to move. Looking back, I can see we were not well off, and though I knew things were different for us then, it never actually seemed bad - except during a hail storm. A metal roofed building in a hail storm is loud.

Things would change, and with that change would come another move, or maybe a few moves.