Describe a house you lived in when you were growing up...

I moved around a lot when I was growing up...so I could have picked a lot of others, but this is the first address that I memorized ~ and have (obviously) never forgotten.

3139 E. 3nd Street, Spokane, WA

(you can kind of see what the house looked like on the day I got baptized in 1978)

This is a teeny-tiny, mint-green house. I lived there for about a year from 1977-1978. The house sits up off the sidewalk (short retaining wall) with a small walk-way to the front steps. There is a small living room, a very small kitchen (we used a portable dishwasher with a table top for meals), and 2 bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. Downstairs there was a small unfinished room to the right of the bottom of the stairs that was used for storage for most of the time we lived there. There was a larger finished bedroom where we had two sets of bunkbeds. I think the laundry room was also downstairs. The house didn't have a garage, but the driveway went up alongside the house.

The backyard was pretty big and there was a huge tree in the far, back corner. One time, my sisters and I noticed that there were some weird red spots on the leaves. We figured the tree was dying, so we pulled off as many of those leaves and put them in a box and we had a funeral for them and buried the box in the yard.

My dad found and rented this house before my mom ever saw it...she was quite surprised at how small the house was -- especially considering the fact that we had 5 kids in our family at that time!



One of our neighbors was an old lady...we called her Auntie Margaret. Her little house was even smaller than ours. She had a tiny yappy dog, who we loved to go visit.



In between our houses was an empty lot...when I lived there it seemed huge! My parents got permission that summer, and we planted a big garden in it. I don't remember what (if anything) we actually harvested, but we had fun in the garden.

(this is a picture of Me, Sheila, Karen and Cyndie on the day the garden plot was plowed)

In 1997 I flew to Washington for my friend's wedding. While I was in Spokane, I took my brother Scott on a tour of the houses I lived in. This is what the little house looked like in 20 years after I lived there...not much had changed ~ the little tree in the front yard is gone, and the house is now blue rather than green. It is still teen-tiny.