A Look Back

I was looking through some old pictures and I came across this. It is the house of my early childhood. My room was on the second floor, you can see the window there on the house's right side, toward the front. The upstairs was attic, empty, when my family moved in. I am not sure when that was. I may not have been alive since I was born in a town nearby. Farmingdale did not have a hospital at the time.

My father, handy with a hammer and saw, finished the second floor. When he was done, there were three bedrooms. My brother's and sister's were on the left side of the house. There was an opening in the shared wall between them where the radiator stood. It was the only heat on that floor. The ceilings of each room followed the slant of the roof. My bed, a single, was tucked in next to the front wall under the shortest part of the ceiling. Cozy.

One of my "pop up memories" was of looking out my window toward the corner of my street, toward where the railroad tracks lay behind the houses on the next street. It was during a heavy snowstorm. Gray skies, snow swirling in the wind, pretty dark though it was mid-afternoon. The street and all the houses and lawns were covered in a thick blanket of snow.

As you can see, it was 1955 when that picture was taken. We moved to Florida the next year in the Spring. Any guesses why?

The picture doesn't show the maple tree that graced the area between the sidewalk and curb in front of the house. I spent a lot of time in that tree. The house looks small to me now. And it was, I suppose. But I was quite little and it seemed very big to me.

And a long time ago.