Those Places Thursday - Remember When You Lived in Your First Home? (Week 2)

    So my first home was apparently with my Mother's parents. Recently my father told me that for about the first year or so after their marriage he and my mother lived with her parents. They had the back bedroom. My father got his job with Chrysler's here in Windsor working the line. He told me he would get home from the late shift and my mother would be asleep; but when he came in he would often find my grandfather up, sitting at the kitchen table feeding me my nightly bottle. If you have read my past blogs at all then you have seen this home at 818 Bruce Ave. in blog dated Nov. 1, 2012.  We were in the back addition (3rd bedroom). While I know this home well, because we spent so much time there. My grandmother babysat me while my parents both worked.

Me (John Goodwin) in my parents room on Highland. Closet door is just left of cameraman.

      The first home I remember actually living in was in the apartment above my other grandparents home. My parents moved in there to get their own space and start saving for a home of their own. This is the home at 1646 Highland Ave. It was in the previous blog about the first memory.  I remember snap shots of things and then other things are clear. I remember going in my parents room to see them, I remember trying to climb into their closet to play. It was an over deep closet, deeper at the bottom (child level) then the top because of the slope of the roof. I remember my uncle coming over now and then. Of course I remember time spent with my grand parents down stairs as they watched me. Especially  my grandfather who stayed home. Being with him, him making me lunches (peanut butter toast), and playing in the yard. I also remember most fondly my father at the kitchen table building model cars. He liked cars and growing up as a kid didn't have the money for toys and things so I think this was his way to recapture some of that lost childhood.  My grandparents had a patch of rhubarb in the back yard and grandpa use to cut a stick off for me and then clean it and give it to me with the blue sugar bowl (pictured in the Jan. 17, 2013 blog of heirlooms), to dip it in and eat. Until my grandmother died when I was 26 yrs old; that home was a central anchor to our family world as was the home on Bruce for our family on my mother's side. I will always look back on these places and "Remember When..." fondly, with love and happiness.