Size Matters

Call me immature, but I chuckled a little when I saw the title for today’s assignment. I had to drag my mind back up out of the gutter, however, because today’s post is about a part of childhood.

Tell us about the home where you lived when you were twelve. Which town, city, or country? Was it a house or an apartment? A boarding school or foster home? An airstream or an RV? Who lived there with you? Today’s twist: Pay attention to your sentence lengths and use short, medium, and long sentences as you compose your response about the home you lived in when you were twelve.

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I grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada. The house I lived in when I was twelve is actually the same house my parents live in to this day, but it looks much different now. It is a bungalow-style house with a single floor and a concrete-foundation basement. When I was twelve we had already put the siding on – it’s a very pale green. Back then there were several large bushes in the front yard, right up against the house.

There were three bedrooms and one bathroom back then, and each of the bedrooms were fairly small. My parent’s bed took up most of the length of their room; there was barely enough room to have the dresser at the foot of the bed and still be able to open the drawers. At that time I took the smaller of the two remaining rooms because I wanted the room that looked out onto the street. For the life of me I can’t remember why…because I was a kid, I suppose, and kids are weird in the head sometimes. The room was long and thin with the type of closet that expands out into the room, taking up even more space.

The living room ran into the dining room. A wall separated them both from the kitchen, but my father busted a hole through the wall and put up a see-through shelf so that the whole area felt more open. The kitchen was all oak-colored cupboards and white appliances, and the window looked out into the back yard. The bathroom was only as wide as the tub, which had sliding glass doors instead of a shower curtain. The window in there was a textured, stained glass kind of thing meant to hide the person in the shower from the outside, and I hated it because it felt weird.

The basement walls were all jip-rocked, but I don’t think we had anything down for flooring at that point. The laundry room also housed the furnance and the oil tank. Back then you could have your oil tank physically inside your house without your insurance provider having a fit. I always thought that room was super creepy for some reason. It reminded me of something out of a Freddy Krueger movie.

One thing I remember distinctly about the house in those days was the ridiculous electrical wiring. If my mom tried to blow dry her hair while the washing machine was running and the refrigerator cut in, we’d blow a fuse. If I was watching TV in my room while mom was running the vacuum in the living room and dad turned the microwave on, we’d blow a fuse. The most ridiculous combinations of circuits would be wired to the same fuse, so that it was nearly impossible for all three of us to be doing something at the same time without blowing one. Eventually my dad snapped and had an electrician come in to fix up the box, but when I was a kid the constantly-blowing fuses were a kind of laughable truth of life.