Where I've lived: Part IV

[vakkotaur]

The place on Spruce Road wasn't bad, but it could be improved upon. A few years into the 1980s things were going very well. So well that we expected to run out of room for machines and the idea of moving into a real house was a real possibility, and certainly an appealing one.

Bloomville is pretty much the joke definition of a tiny Wisconsin town: A few houses, a church, and a bar clustered around a country intersection. Just up the road a couple miles is Gleason. For those who have seen the Mystery Science Theater 3000 take on The Giant Spider Invasion, that's the place it was set and the film is sadly accurate about it. On the northern edge, if it can be called that, of Bloomville is a house and an old creamery building. This spot is also where highway 17 curves and Axen road, far less traveled, continues straight north.

We moved, with some help from a friend who had a truck and trailer. Most of the move went well, though a new stove had to be bought after the old one fell off the trailer along the highway and was damaged beyond reasonable repair. The milling machine, lathe, injection molders and so on were moved into the creamery building. The place was rather old and looked it. I think there was some new wiring added, bypassing most of the old wiring.

The house was two story, with a basement. In the basement was the wood furnace and space for wood - and not all that much else. The only heat was the wood furnace, though the place did have central heat after a fashion. The ground floor had the kitchen, bathroom, and a large living room. There was an addition in the front that was not directly heated and was used as a small computer room/workshop area. Upstairs were three bedrooms, one large, two small. The two smaller ones shared a corner closet in such a way that it was possible to go from one room to the other, but simply using the closet as a closet did not give a view of the other room. Only the ground floor was heated. Upstairs heat, such as it was, was a matter of convection from the ground floor.

The yard didn't seem all that big, and I don't recall using my telescope much, if at all, while living there. There were some lights nearby and the traffic on highway 17 while not tremendous was significant and could get annoying with the headlights. I did still have my night walks, though, up and down part of Axen road. This got me far enough from traffic and lights to see rather well. I was surprised one October evening when a bit after twilight I saw this dim but stunning cone of light coming up from the western horizon and seeming to reach a point overhead. It was the zodiacal light - something I'd heard about, but didn't figure I could see without being someplace really really dark and then having a bit of luck.

It was nice to have the space of the creamery building. With that, we had more room than we needed. And it was nice to have real walls. But the neighborhood was not so nice. One could claim some juvenile delinquency and be mostly right. It was juvenile and it was more than pranks. Fortunately it was mostly not directed at us, but it was annoying. One "family" probably wondered why the police bothered them so much. Well, when someone persists in disruptive, criminal behavior that sort of thing happens. I could easily go on about this bunch, but that's probably best left for another post someday.

I don't have all that many memories of the area as we didn't stay too long. We stayed longer than one year, but not as long as two full years. We moved back to Spruce Road. Staying in Bloomville just didn't work out. The move, while it had some gains, wound up being too much of a loss overall to stay.

Comments

[pharwarner.livejournal.com]

I've always wanted to see the zodiacal lights, that was very lucky of you to experience them. Did the Creamery have any old equipment in it when you moved in? Some Creameries here were quite impressive buildings in their days, and I've seen a few that have been converted into small scale enterprises in rural towns just like your family did in Bloomville.

It's a shame that ep of MST3K isn't available on Video, or I would have picked it up. It was a great one, and watching with you that time made it one of the best eps I've seen.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

The creamery building was empty, or nearly so. No big machines or anything, just stuff left on the walls and the sort of varied debris that seems to always be left behind in a disused building.